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 have

  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