Still cold! Manakin solid tine complete

 

In case you thought it had been cold this month, you are correct. We will close out the third coldest May over the last 14 years in a few days. The weekend weather looks miserable enough that we may even see our current average temp drop into the 63's like 2016 and 2020. We are supposed to pick up 9 degrees from April to May and we only got 3! Good for the greens, NOT good for the bermuda! 

We stripped up another 18,000 square feet of bermuda that didn't make it into 2023 early in the week. 

Half of that bermuda has been replaced with turf type tall fescue. All in shaded moist areas like here behind 3 Manakin as well as behind 5 Manakin and near 5 Sabot approach.

It was wonderful to have the Manakin closed two days in a row in order to solid tine aerate all the short grass. Three tractor aerators poked 3" deep holes over about 50 acres of fairways and tees. These holes will help rooting through the summer and water infiltration.

The walk behind aerators got any tight areas around the tees and greens. These guys were putting in over 30,000 steps each day!

We also pulled some tiny cores out of the greens on the back nine of the Sabot. These 1/8" cores are almost unnoticeable now and will continue to help us get water through the sod layer and help with rooting of our new turf. The Manakin greens were topdressed lightly and fertilized with calcium and potassium.

All 80 tons of compost made its way on to both courses this week, covering most if not all of the rough. The compost too is pretty much unnoticeable while playing but its agronomic benefits will be generous this season. The compost helps build our soil on top of our nasty clay. As the weather warms (sometime?) the microbes in the soil help break down thatch and release nutrients from the soil and the compost that the turf can use to thrive through the season. 

The compost went out slightly thinner than we wanted because of availability this year. That and the fact that we are so far behind in growth because of the weather we decided to supplement the compost with a synthetic fertilizer to get the bermuda moving. We have plenty of rough that remains thin and needs to growth through the Poa annua that has been sprayed out. This is a slow release fertilizer so we hope not to see any kind of explosion of growth but a nice growth curve that can help us fill in and tolerate golfer traffic. We would have no problem saying that you have now played golf for 7 months on dormant golf courses.

We did try to poke some holes in the rough as well but the thinner areas were not tolerating the pull behind aerator very well. We'll make another attempt this summer once the bermuda is moving. For now we are finished poking holes and we will be going out with our wall to wall summer weeds pre-emergent control in a few weeks.

Enjoy the Irish weather this weekend, we'll be back to the 80's later in the week!