Skip to main content

Survey results on Fairways and landing areas


One of the sections of our member survey was regarding the condition of our fairways and landing areas. Overall the comments were very positive. Most of our members have noticed that we have been mowing our fairways shorter than in previous years. This provides a tighter, more dense surface for ball roll and to hit off of.
There was a comment about some areas that are thin and require some attention. On a clay based golf course you often run into issues with heavy compaction and wear areas. Particularly during the height of the season when golf carts are heavily used (including tournaments, etc). Turfgrass has a hard time growing in these areas of heavy compaction because roots cannot navigate through the soil when it is rock hard, etc. We are beginning a new era of fairway maintenance at HCC. We have recently purchased a fairway aerator and a fairway verticutting unit. We are going to be using this aerator (which slices into the root zone) to relieve compaction. I posted some pictures of this machine back in the fall, as you can see there is very little disruption to play.
Another issue that we have at HCC is worm castings on fairways. Although worms are beneficial for soil, the worms create a maintenance nightmare for mowers (and golfer's shoes). The accumulation of castings causes a poor cut and dulls the mowers very quickly. We drag our fairways prior to mowing to help alleviate the issue, but this is a band aid, not a solution. The USGA has done research on the effect of fairway topdressing to help reduce worm castings. This has proven to be true, however it is a process and does take a few years of application to see the benefits. This issue presents some questions for myself and the Green Committee to address in the near future. As I had mentioned, overall the comments on our fairways were very positive. As always, there is always room for improvement.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Practice Range Tee

Last fall we utilized a “new to us” method of revitilization for our practice tee. Our contractor TDS,  fraize mowed the surface of the tee to remove organic matter as well at to aid in leveling. The tee was then aerified and seeded to a new variety of creeping rye grass. We chose this type of turf grass as research  shows rapid recovery and a low growth habit. We were able to get some great growth in the fall, but the tee is still not ready for traffic and full use. The plan is to utilize the mats until growth has filled in some of the voids etc. We will then begin to slowly set up hitting areas on the grass tee. For a while we will alternate between grass and the mats with a 50/50 ratio of use. Once the grass tee is established and is in adequate recovery mode, the practice areas will be back to normal. As always our membership’s patience is appreciated as we try to improve these areas for use.

Venting Greens...

This week we will be venting our greens with needle tines. These tines make a hole that is less than an 1/8th of inch. With our greens being completely saturated from the incredible amount of rain that we have recieved this season, there is no room for air movement in the soil. We need to create very small channels for air movement to the root zone. When roots don't have air, they die. This has not been evident yet, but with the warmer temperatures of July upon us soon, trouble could be lurking. This will be a very non-disruptive process to our members and play. We are going to vent all of our greens over then next few days early in the morning as to not disrupt play. The process is simple, we vent the green using the aerifier and needle tines, roll them smooth and then mow the green. The holes virtually dissapear and are of no effect to roll. I realize that the word aerifier starts to scare people, but this is necessary and again is very clean and non-disruptive. Check out the pic...

Spring Greens Aeration...a week later!

A week has passed since our annual spring greens aeration. We have had a mixed bag of weather, hot, dry, cold, wet and even frost! These conditions make it challenging to aid in healing, but with the more recent consistent warm temperatures we are seeing solid recovery. We were fortunate to have decent weather to complete the process on time, allowing us to fill all the holes created by the 1/2” hollow tines. As there are some minor depressions within some of the holes we will be beginning our bi-weekly topdressing program early next week. Our team is mowing and rolling our greens daily, while slowly lowering our height of cut to our summer norm. We all know that spring cultural practices are not popular among golfers, but these all important tasks are the building blocks for high performance greens conditions throughout the heart of the golf season. Check out this video produced by the USGA on Aerations effect on putting...