Monday, August 3, 2020

Steps Toward Healing

As we approach cooler temperatures and shorter days, the maintenance staff begins to take steps to heal the course, and prepare it for future golf rounds.  Over the next few weeks you will see sodding on greens, seeding of tees, fairways, and rough, and even aerification.  These projects can be disruptive to golfers, but are necessary to keep the course playable year round.

 The greens that were sodded last year, have stayed relatively healthy all season long, except for the large areas of sod.  Our first project will be to get these areas replaced with new sod again.  This year we will pull out some of the existing root zone mix and replace it with new.  Many tests have been run to identify the problem with these areas but no answer has been found.  Hopefully if we replace this sod earlier than normal, we can get it to establish better roots that will keep it alive longer.

We have tentative aerification dates for August 12 & 13.  Weather will be the deciding factor on those dates.  Our fallback dates are September 8 & 9.  Seeding will get started as soon as time allows.  Fall is the best time for over-seeding because of warm soil temperatures which help the seed to germinate more quickly.

Please forgive any disruption to your golf game as we work to keep the course playable for future rounds of golf.