The Follies of The Average Golf Course Superintendent: Finally back

Finally something worthy of posting. I have been gone too long from this blog, but really I haven't had much interesting to post. The 3 of us full timers and a couple of retired guys have been working on just keeping up with regular maintenance items with the warmer spring we have had. Irrigation is now charged and running, with the to do list of repairs getting longer. At least the two leaks are fixed, it is mostly repairing irrigation boxes. Pre-emergent applications have been made, weeds have been sprayed. And we have seeded and aerated some rough areas that had been beat down by our higher than normal winter play.

The one project that I had been wanting to write about is half finished. Well the part on the golf course is finished. We have planted more Wildflower seeds in our low maintenance areas. We had planted wildflowers on in one section of closest to the clubhouse last season and had a great result, well until the ragweed took over in the late summer, prompting me to have us mow it down early. We seeded that area again, hoping along with the existing seeds will bring in an even better result this season. We also added another area on the north side of the low maintenance area this season. The pictures are kind of boring as it is just showing our mowed down field. If last year is any indication, we will start seeing some flowers later this month. When that happens I will post them. The other half of that project is in the beginning stages. We have a field to the west of our maintenance building which is perfect for test plots and nurseries. We plan on planting some Wildflower plots in a small area to try a couple of ideas, one being playing with a pre-emergent to see if it will help with the ragweed in out Wildflowers.

Our other big project finished last week was greens aerification. We always aerify our greens the first full week of April. With some help from one of our other courses, we were able to knock out 18 holes rather efficiently, even as we were trying to beat Mother Nature. And Mother Nature will always win. Below are some pictures of our progress. We are still old school and haven't started topdressing prior to aerating. After the sand is drug in, we will fertilizer with some Ammonium Sulfate and water. We will go quite a few days before mowing. Depending on how the sand had worked in, we will occasionally drag some more and roll greens.

The guys did a great job, we do nine holes a day, and we usually are finished with most of the process with-in an 8 hour window. I will stay late to keep watering in sand and fertilizer. This is our process here. I have worked at courses where we actually stayed and aerated all day from sun up to sun down. Then a couple of our kids stayed into the night watering, (manual system). We were pretty useless that next day. I don't think I've worked at any course where we have done it the same exact way, each course being a little different, mostly because of staffing and different equipment.

Thanks so much for reading!!