Golf Course update and Winter Projects

Winter has arrived across the Golf Course in the last few days, with the temperatures dropping into the 20’s overnight and the cold weekend the turf has settled into dormancy. We had to make some quick adjustments to stay ahead of the quick freeze, but have put the golf course into hibernation in great condition and are prepared to have a great spring next year. I want to give a brief update on the golf course, what to expect in the coming weeks, and what we hope to achieve over the winter this year.

First off, we need to drain the irrigation pond on 13 and 16 all the way below the intake level to have some work done on the pump station. You will notice that we have been running water on the driving range in the mornings and that is to help facilitate the draining of that pond. We are having 2 valves replaced in the pump station as well as a booster pump and to variable speed drive motor. The 2 valves isolate the pumps when work needs to be done and neither of them close all the way, which is why we need to drain the pond. Once the pond is drained we will drain the irrigation system, after the work is completed we will fill the pond again.

We are going to be spraying the fairways with a product that will help control the Poa for next year, when we make this app you will notice a discoloration of the poa. The Bentgrass will be unharmed and set us up for better fairways next year. The collars we sodded are doing very well, the areas that are struggling we’ll let overwinter and seed them in the spring when we do spring aeration. These areas should fill in very quickly in the spring, we tested a few areas to see if we could hex plug them with nursery sod but found it was hard to maintain the correct grade. Rather than have bumpy collars/greens cleanup we opted to seed in the spring. We may get some natural recovery over the winter as well.

Monday we will be going to our 2 cup system for the winter on the greens and rotating flags as needed. We will also be moving tee markers to the front of the tees to protect the rest of the box and let them fully recover over the winter. Most of the tees will end up on or close to the ladies tees on the boxes. With the cold temperatures, we have had to reduce our bunker raking operations, the last couple of times the guys went out to rake the sand was frozen and they couldn’t make an impact. If we get a warm afternoon, we’ll try to get out and get them smoothed out. We are done mowing across the board on the course, if we catch a warm day we’ll try to roll the greens to keep them smoothed out, the last couple times we mowed the greens we got little to no clippings.

In light of all that, we are turning our attention to our winter projects. One of the top priorities is cleaning up the stump grindings from Davies tree and backfilling these areas with soil. We will be sodding areas that are close to irrigation, seeding, and covering areas outside of our irrigation coverage. Davies was out today grinding stumps and are contracted to grind all the stumps on property. They have 5 more trees to remove on holes 5, 13, and 15 and the valley project will be complete.

Next on the list is leveling the greens side heads, many of them are sunk as much as 6” into the ground inhibiting there performance and creating low areas in the green surrounds, we need to do the fairway heads as well but we’ll start with greens and go from there. When the ground freezes, we will continue with our “edge cleanup”, bringing a chipper in again to assist with this. Thankfully, there are no large trees to come down but we do want to do a lot of trimming and brush cutting. Notable areas we are going to try to tackle is the left side and behind 9 green going up the cart path. Between 10-tee box and 18, stream bank from 5 green to 14 green. If we can get these areas accomplished in reasonable time we will tackle the hill between tennis and the hill between tennis and the tenth hole.

Looking forward to having another productive winter and continuing to move the needle.