Golf Course Update...

It seems that weather has been the topic of choice throughout the 2011 golf season. It certainly has been a season of extremes. Currently we are preparing for yet another onslaught of rain. Even a brief shower brings water to the surface, puddling on fairways, tees and some greens is evidence of the saturation point. Environment Canada is forecasting up to 50mm of rain between Tuesday night and Thursday afternoon. What does this mean to the golf course? What this means is that we will be under water! Current conditions are making it difficult for even daily maintenance to be completed. Today we are mowing everything that we possibly can. Growth has yet to slow down as we have not had cold temperatures or even a frost yet. Cart traffic has been severely limited in the past few weeks due to the saturation of the soil. We understand that this causes issues for players requiring carts, but the golf course simply cannot handle the cart traffic in these conditions. The wet conditions are a result of consistent, unrelenting rains coupled with the clay soil that HCC is built on (very heavy clay).

As mentioned earlier, it has been difficult for our staff to perform normal day to day fall maintenance on the golf course. Leaf blowing with carts and tractors has been minimal. We have utilized back pack blowers to the best of our ability (as tedious and labour consuming as it is!). Leaf mulching is normally a daily task, but has also been hindered by the elements. We have however been able to complete some of our cultural practices (topdressing has continued). In conditions like these it is even more prudent that we complete practices like deep tine aeration and fairway solid tine aeration. These practices help provide channels for water and air to travel down to and through the root systems. During saturated soil conditions pore space is severely restricted. We need to open up these soils and provide free draining air/water space.

We are all hoping for better weather ahead. Let's try to have a good last 4 weeks of the golf season!

*Just as a reminder we will be performing our Deeptine aeration of our greens on Monday, October 24th.

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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...

HIGHLAND CC GROUNDS

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