Week of June 10th
It has been a tough past 10 days for the maintenance team. Most of our blog is to highlight what has been going on during the past week, but in this week's blog I would like to highlight some issues we have been experiencing this spring out on the course.
October 2024 will mark my 20th season as a Golf Course Superintendent. Just when you think you've seen it all, something surprises you - and this season has surprised me and the team every week with a new challenge.
Let's start with the fairways. We have been experiencing some of the worst Localized Dry Spot (LDS) I have ever seen. Small areas in all the fairways are not taking water - even though directly next to it has adequate moisture - making it tough to maintain consistent moisture in the fairways. Even with our normal wetting agent applications, nothing is helping to get these areas wet. The crew have been out hand watering these LDS areas every day for the past week or so even after we received 1.6" of rain last Wednesday.
Now for some of the greens. We have seen kill in one biotype of bent-grass on some of the greens. This kill is due to our spring pre-emergent crab grass application. We have done this application in the past and it is hard to figure out why we are seeing this reaction on one type of bent-grass this year.
The good news is we caught it early and are on a good path to recovery. The first picture of the 10th green was taken on May 24th and the second picture was taken on Wednesday of this week.
This week the team crushed it on Monday completing a late spring aerification on greens. The team was able to punch, clean up, roll and top-dress all greens before lunch this past Monday. This will help with oxygen exchange and water infiltration as the summer weather is creeping closer.
Lastly, for the remainder of the week we will be focused on moisture and getting ready for a great weekend of golf.
Thanks for reading.