Picture Perfect!
Hermitage has Ryan Montgomery out here this week for a couple of days, working on some photography for us. Check out some of his work on Instagram at ryanmontgomeryphotography. Here is some of his work from earlier in the week. We can’t wait to see some of the stuff he captured yesterday evening!
Fall decorations are getting ready to go out next week. We’re still waiting on some more flowers and a few other things, but we’ll be getting ready for Halloween and moving toward Thanksgiving.
Another productive week of maintenance! This year we have really put a focus on concentrating on maintenance and not as much on constant projects. We will focus on as many projects as possible November through April. We’re getting down to the nitty-gritty with staffing this time of year. Some of our seasonal employees have already left, and a few more are leaving shortly. The staff is doing a great job maintaining our levels of maintenance without being anywhere near full staffing levels.
We were able to get a little bit of bunker maintenance done earlier this week. We’re also still cleaning up some of the native areas that were cut this week and last. We’re spraying bunker faces and zoysia tees with fungicides and a growth regulator to help control seedheads next spring. This is a worthwhile application that’s scheduled well in advance to help control some of those stalky seedheads that appear in the spring on the zoysia.
Today, we were getting some fungicide sprayed on the Sabot fairways. When temperatures drop, daylight gets shorter, things don’t dry out nearly as fast, and dew patterns get extremely thick, the Vamont can develop a few different pathogens as the bermuda heads into dormancy. There aren’t a whole lot of great solutions for this. It’s just life with an older cultivar.
Here, Ben and I were loading up a tank to get some of these areas sprayed, just to keep them from getting any worse. For reference, here are some pictures of similar areas from last year. We know it’s coming; we’re just trying to keep it from getting too bad before dormancy.
Here’s a picture of the 18th fairway — nice and healthy! That fairway stays drier without any shade issues. We tend to see the worst areas after a stretch of wet weather, usually on fairways with more shade, compaction, and moisture.
One of the guys got a picture of a SpaceX rocket one morning. Pretty neat!
PLEASE!!! Clean up after yourself. Tees, cigarette butts, Zyns… if they’re left in playable areas, they’re litter. Please help keep Hermitage clean and neat. Also, no sunscreen on the grass! That’s what the cart path is for. The sprays can burn the tips of the grass for a time.
Tuesday, all the boys attended our final Greens Committee meeting with us. Before the meeting, we had a little managers’ range session. Grant wanted to include this picture of me, not for the terrible, crouched push-fade setup, but for that spectacular divot pattern!
As we head into the offseason, PLEASE pay attention to your divot patterns on the range tee. This is NOT what you want. This shotgun pattern eats up way more space than a line of divots. With the amount of traffic this tee sees, every square foot matters!
Finally, we have a little friendly wager with Grant on nine holes on the Manakin from the gold tees this afternoon. I’ll have an update on the results next week!
This weekend, temperatures will be dropping into the 30s a couple of nights. The bermuda definitely won’t like it, so when the fairways start to lose color, we have a molasses, iron, and pigment spray scheduled. This should help hold some color a little longer into the offseason.
Have a great weekend!