The calendar may not agree, however for the Grounds team, 2024 is already here. While there are still some daily maintenance items we address, the vast majority of our efforts are currently being put towards creating a successful 2024 season.
A great example of this is the pre-emergent herbicide application which is taking place. This is one of the most important late fall tasks, as we are preventing annual grassy weeds from showing up six months from now.
Last week's aerification had #17 green starting out like this:
However, after all of the aerifying, sand, brooming and rolling, this week has it looking a bit different:
Yes, over five acres of turf covers were installed on the greens. With our H-2B employees finished for the season, this was a huge undertaking for the remaining staff. As usual, another great job by the team!
This past week's late fall greens aerification was a new experience for all of us. The weather during aerification typically has the team more concerned with keeping hydrated in the heat, than making sure we are wearing enough layers to stay warm. Below average temperatures in late November prevented us from getting out first thing in the morning.
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| Aerifying greens with snowflakes in the air, is unusual. |
Since the plan is for this to be the only major aerification event of the year for the greens, we need to impact as great an area of the putting surfaces as we have previously in the combined spring and late summer punching. To that end, we started last week by applying sand, then aerified with a deep solid tine, and brooming of the greens.
This was followed by a .5" hollow tine on a very tight spacing of 1.33" X 1.5". We then removed the plugs, applied additional topdressing sand, and a second brooming.
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| Solid tining completed on the left, and hollow tining on the right. |
So how much of the putting surface area were we able to impact with these hollow tines? Well, the 1.33" X 1.5" spacing gives us nine holes per foot side to side, and eight holes per foot front to back, for a total of 72 holes per square foot. The area of each .5" hole is: .25" X .25" X 3.14 = .19625" squared
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| That's a whole lot of holes. |
When we multiply the area of each plug removed by the number of holes per square foot: .19625" X 72 holes, we find that 14.13 square inches of material was removed per square foot.
With 144 square inches in a square foot, the hollow tining impacted approximately 10% of the greens' surface. As always, when you look at the greens, most people would estimate this figure to be quite a bit higher than 10%...
It's often easy to just say that we could use more help in maintaining the golf course. But it's only by taking a deep dive into where the labor and resources are actually being used that we are able to more clearly see what we are (and aren't) able to accomplish, and why.
The chart below shows that greens and bunkers were the two biggest slices of the labor pie in 2023. Yes, the three acre area which is considered a hazard is consuming the same amount of manpower as the greens, and slightly more labor than the 32 acres of fairways we maintain.
Our seasonal H-2B employees have been absolutely fantastic this year, allowing us to devote more time to both greens and bunkers. In fact, the time spent on bunkers almost doubled from 2022.
With regard to greens maintenance, the additional time spent in 2023 is primarily the result of hand mowing the greens, instead of using a riding mower. This has reduced the risk of a hydraulic spill (like we had on #4 last year), when the smaller staff size forced us to use the riding mower.
There are some other numbers which may come as a surprise to many. For example, 1,165 hours have been spent on divot repair through October.
As the saying goes, if you can measure it, you can manage it. Many thanks to the entire team for tracking their time throughout the year, to Don Holgersen for collecting this information, and to Luke Kringler for presenting it in a manner that is easy for all to understand.
We hope all of the participants in Saturday's Superintendent's Revenge had a good time. This was the first time we were able to get this event pulled together, but hopefully it will not be the last of these.
If you felt that the pin placements were over the top, please direct your complaints to the Pro Shop staff, as they were the ones who chose these 18 never before used locations. While there is no such thing as an "illegal pin placement" there are USGA recommendations--clearly none of which were followed.
Bob and Brett may have chosen the pins, but the Grounds Department added their touch with some obstacles, misleading distances and more. Let's face it, you just don't see an irrigation controller in the middle of a green too often.
We even included a few new diminutive water hazards on #16. If your ball missed the hole, it was off the green and quite possibly wet.
If you answered "No" to this question, don't feel bad--after all, it is November, and we're not yet in a full-blown drought. But if you think back to October, despite the weather forecasters calling for rain every weekend, at best it drizzled on some of those days. In fact, for the entire month, we received less than one inch of rain.
So why don't we see the lack of moisture taking a toll on the turf now? There are several factors which contribute to the difference in how grass responds to dry periods in the fall, versus during the summer months. Obviously, the temperature is one of these, but in addition to that, the number of hours of daylight, the angle of the Sun, and the turf's root length all play a role.
In looking at the data from our weather station, even on bright, sunny days in the fall, the moisture loss is only a fraction of what we see every day of the summer. Additionally, when the frost melts, the heavy dew will provide some water.
A low pond level this time of year is unusual, and speaks to the dry conditions we've seen since the beginning of October.
Another indicator of how dry it's been is that we experienced zero No Cart days in October, which hasn't happened since 2008. One thing is for sure, if this lack of rain occurred in July, we would be dragging hoses, scrambling to keep the stressed turf going.
The bunker work in the golf course Master Plan led to a reduction in bunker area of almost 50%. In situations like this, one of the challenges we face is that any area which used to be a bunker consists of very sandy soil.
Growing grass on the beach is less than ideal, so in order to address this, we are going back through the areas where work took place over the past few years and adding compost to the soil. The material is first applied using one of our topdressers. After this it is aerified, then dragged in.
Additionally, the construction process may also leave an area heavily compacted. Examples of this are on #6 and 15 where the fairways were expanded. Again, aerifying will help to alleviate this issue.
As with many things on the course, this is not a one and done practice. The long term goal is to create a growing medium which is less compacted, and has a greater nutrient holding capacity.
