Topdressing

It's been a few weeks since my last post and things are growing in nicely. The irrigation crew is complete with the irrigation system and it is up and running. We now have the capability of watering the golf course with hand held radios and a computer. The computer will mainly be used for the majority of our watering needs at night. The hand held radios will be used throughout the day to water on demand when necessary. Let me tell you, it's much better than what we had before. Thank you!

Our crew has been working incredibly hard to get the course ready for play in a few weeks. One of our biggest priorities has been to clean up the irrigation trenches. After the contractor compacts the trench, we need to go behind them to rake the ditch, seed, and install mulch mat to get grass growing back over the trenches. This is a very time consuming process. In addition to that work we aerified and topdressed our old greens (1,3-8) and all of the tees twice. The new greens that were rebuilt in the fall (10, 12, 14-18, and 2) were aerified once and topdressed heavily. The new greens that were rebuilt this spring have been topdressed heavily to try to get them smooth for this season (9,11,13).

Did you ever wonder what we did with all of the old bunker sand that we took out? We stockpiled it at our maintenance facility and used it to topdress the aprons around the greens that were rebuilt (2, 9-18). Due to the fact that some of the sod outside of the greens had to be removed and re-laid during the construction process, we have used the sand to help smooth these areas out, just like on the greens.

The grass on #7 that was seeded on the drainage project area is growing in nicely. It will still take quite a bit of time until it is ready for play but the fairly warm weather has been great for germination.