Verticutting, overseeding and topdressing Greens this week...

Verticutting is a fairly common practice on playing surfaces. This process removes organic matter, more commonly known as thatch. Thatch accumulation can create a soft and puffy putting surface. This process also removes some of the aggressively growing tillers of the bentgrass plants. This inturn creates a more upright grass plant, which makes a faster, truer putting surface. The verticut channels also create a good seed bed for overseeding.

As always, "weather permitting", we will be verticutting, overseeding and topdressing our greens this Thursday and Friday. The plan is to start verticutting late on Wednesday night after play and continue Thursday morning. We are starting on Wednesday to ensure that all greens are cleaned and mowed before play on Thursday morning. On Thursday we will overseed the greens with Creeping Bentgrass. We will then begin topdressing either late in the evening on Thursday or early Friday morning (weather permitting). Again, our goal is to topdress and brush the sand/seed into the greens before morning play on Friday. These cultural practices are necessary for us to maintain good healthy greens that will stand up to the stresses that occur during our regular golf season. As I have said in the past, we appreciate our membership's patience and understanding during these tasks.

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Bunker construction on # 17

The past few days we have been able to make great strides on the bunker project on #17. All three of the new bunkers have been shaped and drained. Tuesday morning Ian Andrew our consulting golf course architect, will be painting the final contours in the bunkers. We will then install the bunker boards and back fill with topsoil to the new edges. Once the edges are established we will add the new sand and await sod. The rain and snow that we recieved over the last couple of days has had little effect on the rough shaping process. We are hoping for some drier days to complete the fine tuning and sod prepping.

Golf Course Update

As our season slowly comes to a end our department has been working away at year end projects. We installed drainage in a few areas of the practice range and short game area. These areas were perpetually wet and caused turf and aesthetic issues. We have also been chipping away at the bunkers on #17, smoothing out the faces and recreating the grass edges. These bunkers suffered some severe frost heaving in the faces during the winter after they were built. Our team has removed a number of trees and brush from around our maintenance facility to allow some expansion of our operation. We are working away at clearing space to install aggregate bins and sufficient staff parking. This will also allow delivery trucks and semi's to access our facility without any issues. We are also removing the fallen trees and brush from the woodlot on the right side of #16 fairway. This is a challenging area to work as it is a peat bog and remains wet even in the hottest and driest of summers (like 2010)...

Finish Grading on #2 & #12 Tees

With the great weather that we have had the last two days, we were able to get the tees shaped and all of the tee mix out to the tees. In this picture here, Derek Vergeer (our contractor) is finish grading #2 Tee to be ready for sod. Unfortunately the forecast is for rain the next couple of days and could hold us up for a bit. We are doing out best to complete these projects in a timely manner, of course with this blog we will keep you updated.

HIGHLAND CC GROUNDS

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