Summer Work

Many times I get asked what do you do all winter but here today I would like to tell you about some of the summer things that you might see going on. Obviously over the last 2 weeks we had some very stressful conditions and trying to keep the turf alive was our main focus. Now we have a little reprieve in the weather I thought I would write about a few little things.

Last post I wrote about spraying and managing water in our ponds. The new product that we used called Clipper is still going strong and working well.

On any given morning you will see a lot of employees on a putting green. In this photo you can see cup changing, hand watering dry spots, rolling the green and mowing the apron. Everyone has a distinct task at hand and they all do their jobs ahead of play.

White grubs will be a problem for us this fall and today Jeff Kennicker is finishing up the last of the Merit Insecticide to our roughs. Jeff treats just over 200 acres of roughs for the pesky little grubs.

Spots will drive any golf course superintendents nuts! We can have wet spots and we can have dry spots. To help relieve some of the dry spots in fairways or on tees we use a sprayer to apply a wetting agent. Wetting agents break down the surface tension of the water and it helps to totally wet the soil instead of beading up and running off the dry spot. We just finished up spraying all of the fairways on both courses to help combat the dry spots.

When the dry spots get out of hand or when the soil becomes very hard we use this Wiedenmann solid tine aerifier to break up the hard ground. It helps the water to get down and re-wet the soil and it also allows for a great exchange of gases, mainly oxygen. You can see this process happening in small areas or large fairways. Every tee and fairway are different and sometimes you have to treat them differently.

This past spring we purchased a new Turfco Tow Behind Seeder. We got it out today because it is almost time to do some seeding and try to reseed the driving range tees to help in the healing process. This seeder is specifically designed to do bentgrass and we are very anxious to try it.

This has been a great summer for our flowers. All of the rain early helped them to get established but now they still take some care. We have to hand water, fertilize and weed them on a regular basis. I thought I would leave you with this last photo showing the salvia at the front gate.