AERATION ..... DAY 1

 

 

Here is an photo layout of what we did yesterday in about 13 hrs.

 

 

 

green after double direction vertical mowing.  verti-cutting thins out the turf and cuts the "runners" and blades of grass which have avoided the mowers.   

Verti-cutting greens, night before - following our Monday outing.  I came back to do as many as possible to get a head start on the process.

 

 

Ran out of daylight and got to witness this beautiful sunset on # 12 as I finished up for the evening.

following the verti-cutting was our greensmower, here Lisandro gets it done.  This cleans up the greens for the next process which is the aeration.

Pat ran our aerator on Tuesday.  He walked over 13 miles....backwards while aerating 12 greens. 

we used 3/8" tines that at 2.0" spacing

this is what the greens looked like behind Pat and the ProCore 648.



I promised the membership we would use tines the size of  a pencil to minimize damage and speed up recovery.  Here is a photo to prove the size of the hole.
 

While that was happening on the greens, two men were bringing in our fwy markers which were then painted by our mechanic when he had some time. 

Fairways begin....

at 7:20am the fairway aerating crew began.  they arrived the day before and were ready to go on schedule.

They had 5 machines working at most times and were able to cover ground quickly

The owner of the company was on sight throughout to keep things rolling.

 

Greens continue...

5 of our groundsmen then blew all the aerated cores into piles 

 

piles of cores, which were half thatch and half sand, were then removed from the greens

 

last green for the day was  #12



Next steps on the greens.....

any hotspots were watered, to avoid problems while dragging sand later.

sand topdressing was then applied at a very heavy rate to fill the holes and cover the putting surfaces

15 green topdressed

topdressing was then dragged into the holes and spread as evenly as possible,  below is a finished look at how the greens appear now.   the two holed plug is a foam insert that we place into the hole in the green to protect it from damage during the process. 

 finishing up the fairways for the day...

over a ton of ryegrass seed was the then broadcasted onto the fairways 

seed was then dragged into the holes while the aeration cores were broken up by dragging an old school tine harrow over them.  unfortunately, with no sun the whole day, the core were never properly dried for the process.

more dragging, and dragging and dragging.



the thatch was then blown into the roughs to hopefully be picked up tomorrow by the sweeper.

panorama view from 10 tee as a lot of work is happening all over.

blowing off 18 fairway.


So ends day one of the process, hope the weather continues to be on our side and praying that when we are done it rains like crazy for a few hours to clean it all up.

thanks for checking in....

see you soon, JohnnyP 



 

 



 

 

 

IHCC - July Update

 

We have been blessed with incredible weather this summer, especially so considering the hellacious 2013 summer and winter.   Our golf course, due to it's tremendous variety of soils and landscapes, reacts to what we are dealt in both good and bad ways.   This year we are benefitting from cooler temperatures and while quite dry, the lower temps have allowed our turf to stay strong.  

 

There is a tremendous amount of science involved with our day to day decisions, and despite what some think, we do not randomly maintain the golf course.    a quick example... we do mow our greens everyday, occasionally skipping a cut on a Monday if the club is closed and we do not have an outing.   We do not change the height of cut during the season.  We are currently mowing the greens at .120" - all the greens are mowed at the same height, everyday.   Last week we were accused of raising the heights or not mowing at all.   There were complaints of the greens being very slow for our 1 day Member Guest.  The tournament naturally came on a very nice day that was preceded by 3 days of rain where we received over 3.0" of rain on our push-up greens.  They were soft and quite slow despite being mowed and double rolled.  We were again accused of not mowing and not rolling.   Weather..... its all about the weather.      

 

 

 

Many of you may have noticed a difference in color on the chipping green.   We are one of 10 courses in the US selected to test a "poa annua" control product.  We agreed to treat one sprayer width pass of the chipping green with the product while the other two-thirds is treated as all the other greens.  The two photos below show the discoloration.

 

 

 

I tried to keep up with tradition and gather some of our flowers to make arrangements for the Ladies Tees on 1 & 10 during their Member Guest.  The flowers hold up well throughout the event, but do wilt by mid afternoon.   We also have made 1/2 pink flagsticks and have purchased pink cup liners that add a little something special to our women's and Babe Z events.



Our new theory on replacing divots instead of filling with sand, only works if the divots do get replaced.  Three keepers here on #10 were not replaced and dried.  Our staff is constantly our filling divots with sand and seed, but please try to help by replacing your divot(s). 

Met up with this LUNA MOTH on the right of 14 last week

We tried this product to help us keep our very shallow ponds cleaner.  Without question it has helped tremendously, the ponds are much clearer, have far less algae, and do not have the foul odor they usually have in the summer. 





Random shots taken around the course:

13

turf looking good on new green #15

Sun setting on # 12

New 16

New 15

15

sunset on 12 with irrigation running on tee

 sunset on12 again with irrigation on

Panorama photo of 13 - amazing what quality shots you can get with an iphone

 







Good Morning!



12 Tee looking towards Stamford CT.  Beautiful view.

Things are progressing nicely at the course.  New greens are coming along and on schedule for the Memorial Day weekend projected opening.  All damage to the greens last year has healed and the greens are in fine condition.   Our fairways are dense, and the rough is actually very tough right now due to all of the spring rain.   We are mowing as much as possible to keep it under control while still getting our project work closer to completion.

During the early part of the spring we chose to mow the fairways in a half / half pattern.  The variation in color is provided by the direction the mower travels, as you see in the pictures above the darker color has the mowers coming towards you, and the lighter shows the mower going away from you.   The same occurs when the fairways are striped, the mowers just cut on an angle instead of going around the fairway. 

PLEASE DO NOT DRIVE GOLF CARTS OVER THE BLOCKS AT ANYTIME

We are getting a lot of damage to the blocks that edge the cart paths.  Our new carts have lower transmission casing than our older fleet and they do not clear the blocks.    

  Not only does it damage the block and make for costly repair, but it damages the carts as well.

We have scheduled a mason to repair all the blocks towards the end of May.
  



IHCC WILDLIFE gets a checkup.......

Dr. Goldberg and our very large snapping turtle get to know each other on #2.





New greens continue to improve, sod seems are almost gone.

We have aerated, overseeded and topdressed the new greens twice in the past 3 weeks in preparation for their opening.  They are now being mowed at .195" and we hope to have them at .165" when they open.  Our regular greens are currently mowed at .125" 




Heavy rains continue to make things interesting, we had this 3-3/4" storm wash sod down onto the cartpath on #8.  Thankfully this was a quick fix and the entire hill didn't come down.

We have begun our surrounds project as well, as per our Green Committee recommendation we will be stripping 9' of the mixed grasses in the existing surrounds and replacing it with bluegrass sod.   This will give the greens a very distinct appearance and provide a better and more consistent playing surface.

We are using the sod removed from the surrounds in wear areas near cartpaths.  Here we are repairing the areas near 9 tee with the old surrounds from 1 green.   






Our final bit of info for this update shows the excavator we had hired to replace the broken cesspool on the front lawn of the clubhouse.  The existing pool no longer functioned properly and continually sunk.  the old has been pumped out and filled, the new should provide many years of properly functioning service. 

Thanks for checking in on the blog.   Hope you are all enjoying the golf season so far, I'll see you out there.

 

-JohnnyP