The moisture is back!

 

A gentle two inches of rain fell down over the weekend along with the temperatures. We may have seen the last of the 50 degree nights for a few months, it is time for summer. Thankfully our maintenance day was moved to Tuesday this week. Being able to close until one o'clock allows us to accomplish a number of things like mowing the entire golf course out, edging the greens as well as lightly topdressing the greens.

The sand has to go out on to a dry surface and then the sun can quickly dry the material out. This is an impossible task in the mornings because of the dew. We started brushing the greens just after lunch. The brush moves the sand into the canopy and helps stand the grass up for a nice cut the next morning. The light amount of sand helps smooth out incorrectly fixed ballmarks and protects the crown of the plant from foot traffic, all good things as we head in to the heat of the summer.

We also continue to topdress the tees and approaches on the Sabot course. The Latitude approach here on 5 is growing in nicely. We just ordered 20 dump truck loads of sand to topdress the Manakin short grass after a verticut starting on June 21st. Another greens aeration was on the schedule along with that fairway verticutting for the Manakin but considering how cool the spring has been it is doubtful that we will be doing anything significant to the greens again until the fall.

The cool spring has hampered the vamont bermuda growth on the Sabot. The dry weather along with two herbicide applications has absolutely smoked the Poa annua in these fairways however. More and more bluegrass continues to show its face as well. These thin areas on 1, 9 and 10 mainly will fill in with bermuda as the heat comes on.

Getting both courses mowed out on Tuesday also allowed us to put out our wall to wall summer pre-emergent application. With the soil temperatures rising, crabgrass and goosegrass are ready to start germinating. We apply prodiamine to give us about 4 months of control against these noxious weeds. Each 300 gallon tank covers 6 acres of turf. One gallon of prodiamine is put in that 300 gallons of water and spread evenly over that 6 acres. The rain washes the herbicide in to the top half inch of soil and if a weed decides to germinate, it will quickly die. The foam balls you may have seen this week are just markers for our operators to see where they have sprayed already. In total we covered just shy of 200 acres!

One other pest besides weeds we have to worry about are the blue herons. As cool as they are to look at, having between 8 and 10 of them around the lakes means we deal with what comes out of their backside on a constant basis. Why they decide to use the greens as their bathroom as opposed to ANYWHERE else is a great mystery. We continue to plug out these "heron bombs" and Boomer does his best to chase them back into the water each morning.

We have been persuading the snapping turtles to chase the herons as well but it is not going well!