Hermitage CC Golf Course Management

The bentgrass is also actually trying to wake up as well. The Sabot greens were verticut, topdressed, brushed and mowed once again on Tuesday. Remember, the Manakin greens will be Dryjected and aerated with small 1/4" coring tines on Wednesday the 3rd which is next week. Once this process is complete we will not be aerating the Manakin with anything significant until late in October. Our injury areas on the Manakin are starting to move a little. More sod will be going down early next week.  The rest of the Latitude is really starting to grow. Green surrounds and some fairway landing areas are scheduled to be topdressed next week as well. We are getting our answer about how the bluegrass and vamont will transition in the spring pretty quickly. You are looking at over 50% vamont bermuda coverage already in the bluegrass fairways, tees and approaches. The spring transition will be seamless, it is the fall transition that will be the most interesting. After an intense season of irriga...

Here is your spring 2020 summary picture. Cool season grass enjoyed itself and the bermuda did nothing. This will change shortly. This May has been cooler than last years April. We went from being a month ahead in March to being a month behind in May! 22 more pallets of Latitude sod was laid on Monday this week. This will be the last installment of sod for a few weeks while we wait for Mother Nature to do her part to help fill in many of these other dormant areas on the Manakin. Our season long slow release fertilizer was applied this week on the Manakin. This application will be the base for our growing season. We can add on where necessary as the year moves on. The Sabot will receive the same application in a week or two. We are thankful to bring on 6 more people in June to help us keep up with a normal mowing schedule as things warm up. Gypsum was applied to all the new tees on the Manakin this week. The tees were also solid tine aerated and will be sand topdressed next week. We kno...

Here is our final picture allowing us to complain about spring weather. From the Syngenta website: "A growing degree day is a measurement tool for tracking the accumulation of heat units, which are necessary for monitoring the growth and development of plants and insects. GDDs increase as the temperature increases throughout the spring and summer seasons." See those 1's and 0's up there? That means not much movement in the turf, especially warm season grasses. Thanks to those low temperatures (we actually hit 31 on Saturday and Sunday) we endured two frosty mornings over the weekend. The frosts send the bermuda backwards, especially in the rough. Thankfully we should be finished with any late season frosts and things should FINALLY start moving. As we have been alluding to, sod work started this week on areas that were not going to recover in an acceptable amount of time. 20,000 square feet of turf on 12, 13 and 14 Manakin were stripped up and re-sodded early in the w...

We finally had a day where Boomer had to dig himself a cool spot outside the house this past weekend. The bermuda has almost clawed its way back into the nice color it had 3 weeks ago. Unfortunately, an unprecedented blast of cold air is coming our way right now that is more than likely going to set another frost on the ground. This of course does not do our bermuda any favors while our greens and cool season fairways will continue to thrive. Without even marginal growing weather for bermuda, recovery weather is a ways off. We continue to work through questions about what the problem was around the greens on the Manakin. What it all boils down to, as we have tried to discuss in previous blogs, is an unfair sensitivity of the sprigs to the pre-emergent herbicide applied in February. A different sprayer was used around the greens and believe me when I say we have been through all the different options to figure the difference in application and everything has spec'ed out prop...