Hermitage CC Golf Course Management

We have seen a solid 4 inches of rain come down since this past Saturday night and that puts us well past the airport total of 7" for the month. We'll go ahead and place ourselves in the 8th place spot for wettest March on the books. The rain continues to wash the chaff off the bermuda and despite a few speckles of frost here and there it continues to green up slowly. Monday was a beautiful day however so Joe went ahead and knocked out some additional drainage on 15 Manakin blue and white tee.  Grant, Dillon and Bobby continue to dial in the Manakin irrigation system. All of the part circle out sprinkler heads have to be checked to make sure they are not watering the wrong way and into the fairway. The heads along the native areas have to be adjusted to ensure no water is wasted on the fescue. The goal is to have the natives thin enough to find your ball but dense enough to filter rain water and keep weeds out. The Sabot greens have not moved much with the cool weather. We put...

  The guys got started early on Monday with all three of our greens aerators. 1/4" cores were pulled out of the top two inches of our greens profile on all 20 greens before the end of the day. The absence of the dryject combined with smaller holes at a tighter spacing seems to put these greens through less of a shock in the spring. The performance of the surface through the season has improved with this aeration practice and recovery is much quicker than using the dryject and larger holes. We are still able to get about 30 tons of kiln dried sand into the holes on the greens. This periodic replacement of organic matter with sand helps keep the surfaces firm through the season and allows for consistent water penetration while also providing avenues for root growth.  The sand is brushed in along with a number of amendments. Everything is watered in and ready for play. Another large shot of rain is on the way Saturday so we should be back on a normal mowing schedule next week as ...

  It is easy to overlook work done in the past but after a soaking week of rain last week we had carts off the path on all 36 holes on Tuesday this week. The only way this happens is with diligent drainage and tree work, two tasks that will never end! The Sabot team has starting "relocating" trees in the form of wood chips in the beds around the course.  We dried up enough Tuesday to put the final roll out on the Manakin irrigation project. There will be some tweaking here and there as we start running and checking heads but this project is 99% finished. Joe and the guys go after some drainage on 7 white tee on Monday. This tee was slow to drain after heavy rains so some additional drainage hooked in to the existing pipe should alleviate that problem. Next on the list is 15 blue tee and we'll look to drain a spring on 13 Sabot fairway next week. The deep tine machine finally made its way around the Sabot early in the week. This is a job we usually like to do in early Janu...

  The last 7 days of weather has been miserable! Over 2.5 inches of rain has kept us saturated all week but the forecast ahead (besides Saturday) looks very promising. There is plenty of bermudagrass greening up out there thanks to the moisture, lets hope the frost takes it easy on these 2024 leaves next week. The wiring on holes 5 through 13 on the Manakin is now complete. Save for a few pipes that didn't duck far enough when the plow went over them and some rolling to be done we are in great shape. We plugged the new wire into our computer and popped on a few heads on for fun. Our new central control computer is still in the mail so we were just able to plug a few addresses into our old software to check our wiring. From 9 green all the way out to 5 green we are connected and in good shape. This is just an awesome feat by our staff to be able to put all these new connections in the ground in house. This project will continue to pay dividends for a long time and we are excited to ...