Project Updates

Well its been a really busy couple of weeks down at the Turf Department, with the guys working really hard to get a few more projects done. The first one is yet another tee leveled...

This is a picture of the white tee deck on #11. We again stripped the old sod, regraded the surface, and laid out new sod. We have been generating most of the sod we have been using for these tee projects in house. The sod for this job came from the very back deck on #18.

But when you take the sod off an existing tee deck, then you must replace it somehow. We decided to core aerify a few other decks, harvest the cores, and use them to regrow the back deck on 18. By using the cores, adding a bit of sand, seed, fertilizer, and water, the deck should regenerate fairly quickly.

This is the deck with the new cores laid out before the final finish work.


The second project we were working on yesterday was codenamed the "Dry Spot Protocol" (i thought it almost sounded like a good movie title). The idea behind this particular project was to reduce the severity of an issue we deal with throughout the summer called localized dry spot. LDS occurs when the higher spots of the greens dry out and become hydrophobic. That basically means these areas stress out and actually repel water. It leads to a lot of hand watering through the heat of the summer.
 The theory behind this project was if we could remove columns of hydrophobic sand and replace them with something that would hold moisture better, then we would not have to resort to hand watering as much. So here is what we did...

1. First we core aerified the affected area.  We used 5/8 tines on our 10 tine holders with the Procore 648.We then simply collected the cores. Luckily most of the areas in question fall to the perimeter of the putting surface, so disruption in play would be minimal.

2. This is a picture of Keith brooming in our special secret mix...(it's really a mix of topsoil, vermicompost, and a product called axis). It was a bit time consuming but we had to do it all by hand because of the small nature of the area disturbed.

3. After a quick shot of ammonium sulphate, Keith was on the hose to water in the mixture. Hopefully over the next while these areas will increase their water retention and thus reduce the amount of this.

This is what the final product looked like. We may have to go back and top up some of the holes next week if there is any significant settling in the holes. The greens we got to yesterday included, #6, #17, #16, and #18. We expect to continue with a few more next week. We will update the progress later.

Thanks for reading...