Hermitage CC Golf Course Management

  Both courses were playing nice and firm for the first two days of the Valentine last weekend. Mother Nature then put her finger on a nasty thunderstorm and stopped it right on top of us Sunday morning. Almost 3.5" fell in the same two hours that we would of been getting ready for the final round. Once the rain finished our entire team scrambled and work together to put both courses back together. We switched the event over to the drier Manakin and let them shotgun at 10am while the members went and played the Sabot at 9am off #1. Our team is always up for the task and more than used to be thrown curve balls by the weather! This week we had our 3 day closure set to perform our annual maintenance to the bermuda on the Sabot and aerate the greens for the fall. We got after it on Monday, verticutting the all the front 9 fairways as well as most of the approaches and tees and aerated 12 greens. At lunch it started drizzling and then another thunderstorm stopped dead in its tracks and...

View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Valentine Invitational (@thevalentineinvitational) If you aren't following the Valentine on Instagram then you are missing out on some great content about our facility! Every day they are adding more content to showcase our club for this weekend's event. The golf courses are ready to go and have been enjoying a break from the rain the past two weeks. The weather has been great for bermudagrass and not as great for bentgrass. We are balancing that and hope to present the best facility possible for the players this weekend.  It is probably easy to forget about the new irrigation system on the Sabot but it was done wonders this year as far as raising turf quality. Right now for example we can turn the water off to the fairways to let them dry out but still keep the rough healthy and growing. So many of the fairways lay lower than the rough on the Sabot so having separate sprinklers that can water each area a dif...

  The heat is still on as we look forward to two big events next week. The USGA will be on site this coming Monday holding a U.S. Mid-Am Qualifying event and then the 81st Valentine Invitation will take place Friday through Sunday. There has been plenty of preliminary coverage of the Valentine on Instagram and that will continue through the event. This will be a great week showcasing your golf courses to some of the best golfers on the east coast! This past Monday we again knocked down a large list of beneficial cultural practices. The approaches on the Manakin were lightly topdressed as well as some select areas on the Sabot. In the peak heat and humidity of the summer the latitude likes to scalp so the sand helps alleviate that, giving more space between the mower reel and stems of the plant.  The greens were also topdressed lightly for a third week in a row. A thunderstorm rolled through at 2:30 and washed everything in perfectly. We went ahead and verticut and topdressed t...

  3 inches of rain soaked us down last weekend but some nicer low humidity days followed up this week. The weather has been pretty average this summer, with bursts of moisture when we needed them. There are not any more 100 degree days on the horizon either so maybe all of our summer help going back to school can actual signal a downslope into fall. This is by far the best year we have had on the greens. We have been able to keep our clipping yields low and stay ahead of any summer weather induced diseases. Putting speeds are adequate for August and having them healthy headed to September means we can step back on the gas more quickly. All 20 fans are operational (as of this minute) and continue to make a world of difference on greens with restricted airflow. A dry light topdressing was again applied to the greens on Monday. This sand has been very beneficial over the last two weeks, combatting the puffiness potential of the bentgrass as well as the mid summer ballmark epidemic. By...

  The drop in humidity as well as temperatures in comparison to last week was a very welcome change this week! We were able to dust the greens with sand on Monday to help firm them up a bit as well as help ballmarks heal over. The greens are in great shape heading into August but please remember to keep finding and fixing your ballmarks!  Also on Monday we went after our herbicide wash scars on 3 and 16 greens and a small spot on the back of 5 Sabot. Some beautiful Pure Eclipse bentgrass was stripped up from the Sabot putting green and quickly laid down on the impacted areas.  The new sod blends in nicely and should start rooting in this weekend. Please try to avoid walking on these areas and we will continue to keep the pins out of the way for another two weeks or so.  The putting green was put back together with sod from Collins Wharf sod farm which is who originally grew our Pure Eclipse. While not exactly the same, this sod should will also blend in relatively qu...