Goodnight Greens

Once again, the team needed to pivot with the daily (sometimes hourly) changes in the weather.  This past week the greens were rolled, sprayed and fertilized.  

Cover installation began on Tuesday, which was followed by a very warm (but very wet) Wednesday, with 1.25" of rain.  The skies cleared on Thursday, however wind gusts in excess of 40 mph forced a pause in placing the covers.  The initial covering of #1-18 was finally completed on Friday.

One change from last year is that we will be leaving the Clubhouse putting green uncovered this winter.  This will allow members to continue to use the putting green (although on a bumpy surface).  Perhaps more importantly, leaving a green uncovered provides the best test plot for comparing the healing time to a covered green.

Throughout the year, we find the temperatures on the Clubhouse side of the bridge to be a bit warmer than on the open golf course.  Therefore, the uncovered Clubhouse putting green still may recover slightly more quickly than an uncovered  green would on the golf course.  

The Waiting Game

When we aerified the greens just prior to Thanksgiving, we weren't expecting several days of frigid temperatures to alter our plans.  As mentioned last week, there was still work to be done on the greens, prior to covering them.  Specifically, we needed to:

• Apply additional topdressing sand
• Broom the greens
• Roll the greens several times
• Apply fertilizer
• Apply fungicides and a plant growth regulator

With lots of fresh holes in the sand-based greens, temperatures can fluctuate much more quickly in the upper part of the rootzone than in the topsoil fairways.  The nighttime lows lead to frozen greens--not a good time to be putting heavy equipment on them.  Thus patience has been required.

Although the wind was quite oppressive on Thursday, the greens were thawed and we were able to complete the application of topdressing sand.  While we may be dodging rain drops this week, the temperatures should be good to complete the needed processes, and put the greens to bed for the winter.

If "A" is for aerification...

...then "I" is for inconsistent.  The late November greens aerification took place last week, and as always, we were at the mercy of Mother Nature.  Monday brought some blue skies and great conditions for the first step of the process, which involved applying sand topdressing and solid tine aerifying the greens.

However, conditions were dramatically different on Tuesday, when we had to deal with morning showers.  By the time the rain stopped, we had received 1/3", which was enough to make the second phase of the operation quite challenging.  

The aerifiers were fine under these damp conditions, but the cleanup crew had to be very careful when trying to remove the cores.  This is the first time we felt the need to place plywood in order to prevent damage from the core harvesters.  The moisture also caused the topdressing sand to "bridge," or cover the aerification holes without actually falling into them, and filling them up.

So while the aerification we performed was actually quite consistent, the ever-changing weather lead to varied conditions on the greens--some having many open holes and others appearing to need no additional sand.  

More rain on Thanksgiving helped to move some of the sand down into the holes.  We will be adding additional sand as needed this week, prior to covering the greens.