Skip to main content

No Pain, No Gain...



I have mentioned before, performing agronomic practices that benefit turfgrass for the long term, can sometimes stress the turfgrass in the short term. One of my favourite sayings is of course "No Pain, No Gain". Basically saying that "the end justifies the means".
As I am sure some of our members have noticed our aerification process has brought out some of the vulnerabilities of our property. On fairways you may notice some very dry and stressed areas (top picture) as a result of the aerification on a hot and dry August day. With the very wet spring and summer that we have had, the root growth on our turf is shallow. In some of these areas the aerifier separated the turf at the root ends and has dried out considerably. Fortunately, one of the benefits of aerification is the promotion of root growth. We are doing our best to hand water and manage these areas to promote recovery... if the forecast holds true with rain and nice warm growing weather we should recover relatively quickly.

On our greens, there is obviously alot of sand for the turf to grow through (normal for our greens program). You may have noticed some stressed/scalped area on the outside perimeter of our greens (bottom picture). This is a result of the heavy verticutting that we did. There is an issue with thatch build up on the perimeters, this is attributed to the mowing pattern in which we do with the triplex ride on greens mowers. The ride on machines are very heavy, there is a syndrome aptly named triplex ring syndrome, this is the heavy wear and tear from the tires of the mower circling the greens continuously. We try to avoid this by skipping the perimeter cut as often as we can. We are even starting to cut the perimeter with one of our walking mowers. I realize that the result of this practice (verticutting) is rather unsightly, but obviously if 90% of the green is not effected by this process, there is a problem with these areas. Through diligent aerification, verticutting and cultural management we will resolve these issues, there will just be a few bumps and bruises (literally) along the way. To aid in recovery along with fertilizer, we have put some bent grass seed down in these areas to promote some more desirable grass along the worn areas.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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.