Maintenance Morning Planned Today To Prep Greens For This Weekend's Club Championships

With the recent heatwave, it's been a few weeks since we've given the greens a perk up with a venting and a light topdress, to provide some aeration and smooth up the putting surface.  This morning we will carry out this process along with a light verticut to true up the surfaces for this weekend's Club Championships.  The work will be done starting at 5:30 am so most of the process will be completed before most players arrive on the course.

Greens vented this morning before topdressing to get some air into the soil profile

Greens topdressing including approaches

It's been a month now since we've had any significant rainfall (1" or 25mm worth).  Comparing numbers from last season for the time period starting June 1 to today's date we have received only 97mm of rain compared to 214mm in 2015.  That's only 45% of the amount of rainfall!  Last season the temperature also never reached 30 degrees C any day.  This year we've had a total of 13 so far with 3 more predicted this week starting this afternoon.

It's been a challenging season battling the dryness.  It's the most we've had to depend on irrigation in a single season since installing the new irrigation system in 2006.  Despite the extreme conditions the greens, tees and fairways are holding up extremely well with firm and fast playing surfaces for players enjoyment.  The visual isolated dry brown spots mainly in the rough around the property are mainly caused by equipment and cart traffic, and weak grasses (poa annua) that can't take this extended heat and drought and compaction.  We plan on starting an aggressive overseeding and sodding program delivered over the next few weeks to replace the weak grass with more tolerate varieties such as Kentucky bluegrass.

Enjoy your round and thanks for your patience during this important process.