Ready or not, here we come - Sabot F9 opens Tuesday!

The Sabot front nine will have been closed for 170 days come April 19th. Of those 170 days we have seen about two days of bermudagrass growing weather, today and yesterday. Our irrigation and greens project is coming together nicely thanks to the amazing efforts of not only our staff but the staff of Landscapes Unlimited. Working through the cold and wet winter weather they never stopped on their way to installing ten miles of new pipe and over 700 new sprinkler heads. We are ready for golf, we aren't ready for TV, but we can play golf.

The new greens are down to a pretty normal height which is .125". We'll be mowing and rolling through the weekend and thanks to the aerations on the other 27 holes, these new greens are already the best surfaces we have to putt on at the moment. Remember, there are no ballmarks on these greens, lets try to keep it that way.

We have posted plenty of pictures of all the disturbance from this project. We have pieced everything back together the best we can with what Mother Nature has given us. As the temperatures continue to warm up, everything will knit in nicely.

The fairways on the Sabot, especially on the first few holes like 8 and 9 where the irrigation was put in, are greening up quickly. The Manakin is behind for a few reasons. The main reason being cart traffic. There has been no golfer traffic on the dormant vamont vs the Manakin which has been pummeled all winter. In addition, the Latitude on the Manakin has actually tried to green up about 3 times, earlier than the vamont. That has meant that green tissue has been blasted by cold temps (24 on March 28!) and frost 3 times which has slowed its spring arrival. The vamont is much slower to wake up so the frosts haven't hurt it as bad and with no traffic it is loving life right now. In a few weeks none of this will matter and everything will be looking sharp!

We have finished up some small details like new paver curbs on 9 green and 3 tees.

Fresh mulch and pine straw is making its way to the higher profile beds.

We even had the tree climbers out to prune up some more difficult branches on both courses.

The last few pipe crossings have been patched with fresh asphalt. All the new paths have been sodded up against and tied in.

About the only thing we do not have ready to go is our recirculation pump for 5 stream. The way we spec'ed the power wire out for the pump did match up with the actual demand the pump wanted once we finally got the electricians out here to wire it up. We'll have to figure out a way to get more power down to the stream to get this pump working correctly.

Manakin aeration was completed this past Monday and Tuesday. The dryject put another 40 tons of sand in the profile and then we simply pulled small 1/4" cores out on top. We bypassed the normal larger hollow tines and solid tine double aeration this spring. Pulling smaller cores out now will allow us to recover faster with less need to push the turf along with fertilizer. This should help us stay leaner and stronger come summer time. We will however be coming back with the small 1/4" tines in mid June for one last vent before the weather gets hot. And the weather will get hot soon enough!!