Sabot greens aeration and some updated Golf Course Care guidelines
With the new website coming online, we can also introduce the guidelines for caring for the Golf Course. These guidelines are simple and help protect the clubs greatest asset, the Golf Course. Playability and health of the Course, along with player satisfaction, are top priorities of the Golf Course Management Department. We kindly ask that players take part in repairing their own damage on the Golf Course as per the guidelines below. Please also brief your guests of these guidelines prior to you round.
- Keep your cart on the path as much as possible. When possible, enter the fairway at a 90-degree angle heading toward your ball position.
- Cart traffic should be scattered through fresh turf areas and rarely concentrated into a single path. This includes pinch points on fairways as well as entry and exit points from the cart path.
- Carts are allowed to travel in the rough and on the fairways, scattering their traffic paths. Steep mounds and tall grassed naturalized areas must be avoided.
- Carts should never travel on the closely mowed approaches and never between the greens and greenside bunkers. Carts should remain on the path around the green.
- Carts are to remain on the paths on all par 3 holes.
- Please make an effort to find and then fix your ballmarks properly by pushing the turf in toward the middle of the mark. Replace divots when possible. If the divot is unrecoverable, please fill the void with sand.
- After play in bunkers, please rake out footprints and place the rake inside the bunker head first with the handle resting on the turf edge of the bunker.
Many golfers think we "like" aerating greens. We like it because agronomically, the surfaces will be set up for success through the summer. The fact is, aerating is a ton of hard work. We started off by having the Dryject company come in and inject over 40 tons of sand into the greens. That 40 tons of sand was hand delivered via 5 gallon buckets by 6 of our staff to 3 different machines.
The Dryject gives us some nice sand channels but older organic matter still has to be removed from the greens. The inherent fault with bentgrass is that is produces thatch (dead stems, roots and leaf tissue). That thatch has to be removed a few times are year in order to produce a firm, healthy surface. Again, this is hard work. The aerators pull a core about 3 inches deep. The cores are pushed to the collar and then shoveled into a cart and hauled away.
The greens are then brushed and rolled smooth so the topdresser can apply more sand to fill the aeration holes.
The greens are brushed in two different directions so that as much sand can fill the holes as possible. Before the brush we also applied a zeolite clay that helps retain and meter nutrients and water for the turf more efficiently.
Once the sand is brushed in a variety of nutrients like nitrogen, potassium, calcium and magnesium are applied. These nutrients set a baseline of health for the season and allow us to spoon feed supplements for the rest of the year.
There is your finished product on the Sabot greens. There is definitely still sand on the surface which will prevent us from mowing in the dew. The greens will be mowed dry on Friday afternoon in order to clean them up for the weekend. With the warm weather the bentgrass should start filling in relatively quickly. If we catch a thunderstorm this weekend that would be very beneficial in moving the rest of the sand down and getting us back into a normal mowing pattern. We appreciate your patience with the bumps but just remember, you have an equal chance your ball bounces in the hole as you do it bounces out of it!
With the greens taken care of for the week the team spent some time resetting the bunker edges on both courses. With the smooth faces, over time they can get some algae, silt and weeds popping in. The bunkers were raked with the machine to fluff the bottom and then the edges were raked and smoothed back out again. The next rain will pack them back in nicely.