Hermitage CC Golf Course Management

  The rain has not held off this week. As has been the case, the forecast was for around an inch of rain and we ended up with 3.5 inches. Our normal for the year is just less than 44 inches. For a little perspective, the average for New Orleans (the wettest city in the country) is 63.5 inches. The wettest year on record was 1889 for Richmond, when they counted 72 inches of rain. Second place was 2018 at 63.73 so 2020 is well into the new second place for our property. A trend that hopefully does not continue into the new year! In between rain storms this week we were able to get out a light topdressing and some winter nutrients (calcium, potassium and magnesium). The rains again washed everything in nicely Wednesday. Continued topdressings this winter will help the bentgrass hold up better to golfer traffic and more rain. Our search for valuable stones in old curbing around the course is just now coming to an end. These nice river stones are much better suited......in a stream. We ...

  Our week again started off cold and wet. We went after another project on our "Monday list" which was knocking some curbs down behind the driving range tee. The curbs made it difficult to get a push cart up towards the tee so we we opened up 3 areas for better entrance and exit opportunities. The concrete curb was almost 10 inches in the ground which required a trip to Sunbelt for a jack hammer which is always enjoyable. A row of 3 pavers were added in the main entrance spot and the turf was tied back in.  Two smaller areas were busted out towards the left hand side of the tee. We also stripped the sod along the entire curb and leveled that sod out nicely. A paver rectangle was also created underneath both water coolers in order to give a more finished look at the range. Amazingly the Latitude on the Manakin is still holding green color after multiple mid 20 degree frosty nights. We have used no pigment and no paint this year and the playability is still excellent. We have ...

Two more inches of rain came down on Monday bringing our annual total to 64 inches. We are now 20 inches over our normal annual total of 44 inches. At least when it rains our waterfalls on 5 stream look nice. We are continuing to build and tweak these features on 5 as the rain and water flow tells us what to do. We have to keep telling ourselves this amount of moisture is not normal. When taken in consideration the extra rain, things are relatively dry. Olvin and Maggie took some time this week to start tying in our sand drainage lines to the basins. Some of the basins are in rough shape anyway so opening them up and making sure the pipes are attached correctly is going to go a long way. It doesn't get any easier to see the results of our bluegrass survival experiment on the Sabot now thanks to the frost. Full sun fairways are very sparse while shaded areas of fairways are not terrible. However, the seed that we put down the first week of October has done nothing. Despite the moist...

  26 degrees this morning! The frost is down and the bermuda is done. We are about 15 days later seeing this hard frost than last year. Now we will get to find out exactly what the bluegrass is doing on the Sabot. Unlike last year, the bermuda has persisted late into the year and we didn't have the chance to really slow it down like last year. The bluegrass will be thinner and once the bermuda turns off color we will determine if and how we can push the blue along. The Manakin will turn brown over the next few weeks and stay that way. The paint from last year looked ok but that $20k is better utilized during the growing season.  Our big project for the week was taking down a few more pines to the left of 10 Sabot. From the green on 10 you now have a full unimpeded view of the lake. We have continued using the water wick machine in the fairways as well. #1 and #6 were sliced this week. Next week we will start digging in french drains that connect the sand lines straight into th...

  After a nice dry start to November we have once again gotten crushed by rain. After 11 dry days the Sabot was just finally starting to dry out. Now, the fairways are literally unplayable and walking on them brings up straight mud. Hopefully the sun dries things up a little bit on Friday and we can let play back out on Saturday on the Sabot. Either way, carts will be on paths for a long time and even push carts coming off the path will be doubtful through the weekend. Water is headed towards Kinloch as fast as possible. We made a number of preparations this week for the rain, the simplest being putting out straw bales and sand bags in normal problem areas where massive amounts of water run. We had already made the decision to solid tine aerate the Sabot fairways starting Monday. We poked all the fairways about 4 inches deep and finished up Tuesday.  The deep tine aerators went out to the wettest fairways on the Sabot and poked 8 inch deep holes. Both of these processes will e...

  Manakin greens aeration was knocked out quickly on Monday. The deep tine aerators went across the green first, poking 8 inch deep holes through the upper profile. The walk behind core aerators came quickly behind and pulled out a 3/8" core. This is only the second time we have pulled a core on these greens this year. With covid pushing all our golf events to the fall, we obviously wanted to wait until those were over before we punched again. Here is the reason we pull cores. This layer of dark anaerobic soil just under the surface of the greens is what causes them to thin in the summer and also what holds us back from pushing the greens hard for speed through the middle of the season. This layer is caused from skipping aerations and pushing the greens at the wrong times resulting in thin, unhealthy turf. In the last year and a half we have deployed as many different cultural practices as possible to alleviate this layer and give you the healthiest surfaces possible to putt on. B...

  Here comes another hurricane bringing more rain for the weekend. We have been getting crushed with rain weekly in October. This combined with a massive lack of sun and cooler temperatures has meant soggy conditions, especially on the low lying Sabot course. Temperatures will take a nose dive over the next week as well, we can only hope for some sun to come out. We have had plenty of rain to keep our bluegrass seed wet but it has been very slow to come up. It is starting to show its face now and we will begin fertilizing as the bermuda heads into dormancy. The bluegrass from last year are dark patches out there and the new stuff is still light green. There will definitely be some Poa annua mixed in this year, as it was last year, but we can deal with that later in the winter/spring. We dodged enough rain this week to get our projects on the Sabot finished up. Remember the old bentgrass blue tee on 5? There is the new one covered in Latitude bermuda. It has been moved to the right ...