11 days until Sabot F9 opens back up

 Reminder: The Manakin greens will be aerated on this coming Monday. We will be Dryjecting and then simply pulling out tiny 1/4" cores. This is much less painful than the standard spring aeration and we will explain that philosophy next week!

We cut our first two cups in the Pure Eclipse this week and got the chipping green open. The bentgrass has been slowly recovering from aeration while the bermuda keeps going backwards.

Over the next 11 days we'll keep inching the mowing height down to try and match up with the back nine greens. The Pure Eclipse looks great and while it won't be at Augusta tournament speed on the 19th, it will be strong and healthy and ready for a great season.

The frost on Saturday did a number on our bermuda that was greening up. As the final sprinkler heads went in last weekend, the plywood from the workers protected a few spots in 1 fairway. The frost set up and smoked the leaves that weren't protected from the plywood. This backwards movement does not help us as far as getting the irrigation project cleaned up and looking fresh. We'll need to avoid frost again this weekend to be able to have things looking nicer on the 19th.

Over 2 acres of sod, be it around new features or sprinkler heads, has been laid since December. We have had just about 0 days of bermudagrass growing weather to date since then. If you are expecting super clean and filled in bermuda on April 19th then you may be disappointed. We are opening because the greens are ready and well rooted. The Sabot front nine will continue to be dialed in as the weather improves!

The main thing you can prepare for as you come onto the Sabot on the 19th is to repair your ballmarks. Here is a fresh mark on 18 green from Tuesday. Not looking for and fixing ballmarks because the greens are aerated is such a lazy and poor excuse. There are absolutely ZERO ballmarks on the front nine of Sabot. These greens are tough enough to take a mark and have it fixed properly. Not many memberships have the opportunity to keep their greens ballmark free, your chance to do this is 11 days away.

The asphalt went down this week in between rains and now we are left to patch up the edges.

Excess gravel is removed, soil is filled in and then the edge is prepped for sod which will come next week. Unfortunately paving is not just as simple as removing and replacing existing asphalt. A hefty amount of handwork is involved to finish off these nice smooth additions.

The gravel path on 5 is now connected from the bridge on 4 to the bridge on 5 with asphalt.

The wood chips left of 3 tee cartpath were removed and replaced with tall fescue sod that will grow up to be native area height.

Over on the Manakin we took out two of the cedar trees that were blocking the view of left side of 17 fairway. This area will be sodded next week and we'll try to patch our cut through road up a bit. On the stump grinder here is Ian Harrison. Ian comes to us after working at CCV for 3 years and is very passionate about turf. He is currently pursuing his turf degree and will join our management team as an Assistant in Training. Ian has grown up around golf as his late father was a Golf Professional in south Florida. Ian carries a 3 handicap so he is happy to show you how to fix ballmarks!

Since Grant has come back from his stint at two spectacular TPC courses, he has been working hard on setting up our shop to be more efficient. The equipment in our main building now runs 90 degrees and everything has its own parking position.

In our capital renewals and replacements model this spectacular lean to is being replaced this year. It used to run the full length of the shop area but was curtailed about two years ago.

It has been removed now and the whole center area of our facility will stay open so that we can stage equipment in the morning and be able to move around fluidly throughout the day. 3 new metal buildings are in production and should be up and running in May. 

We have quite a few exciting things happening! We couldn't be more excited to start mowing grass again but just like every spring, we have to be patient and wait on Mother Nature!