Hermitage CC Golf Course Management

  Two years ago our priorities were a little different on the Manakin! The latitude bermuda continues to hold up well to cart and golfer traffic in the summer heat! Our bentgrass greens have figured out the heat and humidity this year as well. You can see the tire marks from the sprayer on Tuesday morning from the pervious Monday morning spray. Our closed until 3pm Mondays are giving us a chance to wash in a fungicide application as well as some topdressing sand. Both are adding up to a better quality putting surface this summer. The new fans on 6, 7 and 14 Sabot as well as 2 Manakin have made a night and day difference compared to last year. Our new bentgrass nursery green has been seeded between the tennis courts. The pure eclipse bentgrass will match the new greens on the Sabot. We should see germination by this time next week. The lower parking lot walkway and steps are all finished up. Over behind the pumphouse we have two 14" pipes that allow water to flow into the pump stat...

  We went out and made ourselves a mess this week on Sabot! All the fairways, approaches and tees were vertically mowed, just like the Manakin was a month ago. The difference is that the vamont bermuda here on Sabot is incredibly coarse and thick. The latitude bermuda is much finer on the Manakin. The  texture difference combined with the simple age difference meant that the vamont produced an amazing amount of material for us to clean up. Thankfully we have had some dry days and the clean up went relatively smoothly. There is no doubt that we pulled more material off 25 acres of the Sabot than we did over 55 acres on the Manakin.  Once cleaned up we moved on with the sand topdressing. The vamont ate up the sand as well and we needed about 4 extra truck loads (100 tons) to finish up the fairways, approaches and tees. The result of all this work will be a slightly better textured surface, but certainly firmer, thanks to the sand and reduced amount of thatch. The results ar...

  Our sand is on site and new blades are on the verticutters in preparation for this Monday's cultural event. The Sabot will be closed on Monday and Tuesday while we work to thin out the bermuda and continue helping the Sabot firm up. A light topdressing went down this past Monday on the Sabot tees. After next weeks verticut a heavier dose will go down. More sand was put down around the greens on the Manakin as well. These in season topdressings help keep things firm and tight as well as greatly reduce any scalping with the mowers. The bermuda has responded nicely to the verticutting on the Manakin so we are excited to get it done on the Sabot. Each vertical mow ultimately increases plant density of the bermuda, creating a smoother, tighter surface. Every 2-3 weeks we have been applying plant growth regulators to all the fairways and tees. The regulators, like on the greens, help promote a tighter and healthier surface and reduce clipping yields. We will also spray growth regulator...

  Kevin Gibson, one of our lead operators on the Manakin has now worked here for 25 years! Dunstano, our head mechanic has now worked here for 20 years! Both Dunstano and Kevin are integral parts of our team and we can't thank the membership enough for allowing us to take care of them over the years! The Manakin fairways have healed up nicely from the verticutting and sand topdressing two weeks ago. This is prime time for the latitude bermuda, these surfaces are playing firm and as consistent as absolutely possible. With the bermuda loving life, that means a little faster action on some detail items like edging tee plaques and sprinkler heads. This is almost a constant task through the heat of the summer. About a month ago, the plant pathologists at Virginia Tech laid out a fungicide trial on the Sabot putting green to investigate efficacies of different fungicides for pythium root rot (PRR) on our bentgrass. PRR is a unfortunately common disease on our greens, mainly due to the ag...

  Everyone started off in the same place this past Monday, on the front range tee. The old vamont bermuda turf was striped off and taken to the dump. The size of our range tee (half acre) is about 1/4 of the size it needs to be for a 36 hole membership. While there is not a lot we can do about that right now, we can put down a more improved bermudagrass variety.  The top range tee apparently has already been replaced with a better bermuda than vamont but the lower (larger) tee had not. The top tee recovers relatively quickly from divots while the lower tee struggled. Tahoma 31 bermudagrass  was laid down quickly on Monday. This entire 15,000 square foot area was stripped, smoothed out and re-sodded before 1:00pm. We will keep this sod wet and it will knit in rapidly with these temperatures. The Tahoma boasts a very tight canopy and should hold up to divots very well. A few extra pallets of the Tahoma were left over from the range tee so we were able patch some small spots...