Second aerification week: "Surviving the Cut!"

When I was growing up my Dad was a Fireman and also the fire department's mechanic.  When ever I wasn't in school or out creating havoc on the neighborhood I'd be at the shop with him tinkering around getting all greasy.  He used to always tell me "This is the part of a fire department nobody ever thinks about!  Everyone only thinks about the shinny fire truck putting out fires, nobody ever thinks about what it takes to keep the trucks on the road."  He was right, right up until the point I had grease up to my elbows and in my hair I never thought of anything but Dalmatian puppies, heroes and saving the day when I looked at a fire truck.  Not so much any more!  A similar perspective is often taken with golf.  Call me jaded from having an insiders perspective but when I see a golf course on T.V. like Congressional my first thought isn't how beautiful it is or how fast the greens are, I think "What does it take to make it look like that?"

This is the whole reason for this blog.  As those who are paying the bills I think it is important for you to know what it takes to have a great golf course year round.  Many of our members are only used to golf up north where the grass only grows for less than half the year, that changes everything drastically.  Up north two aerifications on the greens is a good program, CCN does it 4 times.  Up north you play golf during the active growing season, CCN's golfing season is during the non-active growth part of the year.  As you can imagine, there are many drastic differences in northern golf verses southern golf and that translates into drastic cultural practices differences when it comes to what you do.

As the title of the post suggests, this course closure was all about cutting things back.  We cut back the grass, the bushes, the trees, the bunker faces...we went cut back crazy.  As usual this go around for CCN we aerified the greens using our normal aerification techniques.  For those statistical people, we removed around 15% of the putting surface.  Aerification is the most important thing we do to the greens!  This process removes the most organic material and allows for massive organic matter dilution in one fell swoop.  After aerification the cores were removed and the greens were top dressed with straight sand, brushed, then rolled repeatedly to smooth them back out.


This picture is of an aerification plug from a green. All of the "bio-mass" of brown stems and thatch (the dark colored sand on the top half of the plug) is what I want to control. We want some to give the greens receptivity, but not too much which causes performance problems.


On the rest of the golf course is where we really went to do the heavy work. We still aerified all of the playing surfaces and top dressed them, but the main focus of the week was cutting back everything. By cutting back I mean


I achieved this by lowering the height of cut all the entire golf course. Remember at the beginning of summer when the grass on the course started getting real swirly as seen in this picture

and you could pull up on the grass and it would stand up 6 inches tall


the way you get rid of all that is to verti-cut like we did last course closure


As well as by reducing the mowing height like we did this time to chop off any remaining grass still laying over. The look of the scalping is much more dramatic in appearance than its affect on the grass. I reduced the cutting height on the fairways from 1/2" (.500) to just over 3/8" (3/8" = .375 and the fairways are at .400). The tees, collars and approaches went from 3/8" to just above 1/4" (.375 down to .300). The roughs went from 1" down to 3/4" . The tighter cut will help produce a grass canopy that is more vertical and not so leggy. I am going to try and maintain a little bit tighter collars and approaches this season so that you can putt the ball from off the green even easier.

So even though a week ago it looked like this


In just 7 days it looks like this


Other areas that we cut back are very noticeable around the course. Once again I brought in the ficus hedge trimmer (the helicopter trimmer to some) to trim the perimeter hedges. It has been 3 years since the ficus have been trimmed so the initial look is pretty severe, but remember I did the same thing before and the trees were fine.

In this picture I tried to give you a sense of how much off the sides was being trimmed, it was about 4 feet of material. Sorry for my terrible photography.


I also had 1/3 of the top removed. Lowering the overall height will cause the plant to "thicken up" in the lower branches which will create more screening.


Just like the grass, the initial shock will not last long and soon you'll see new leaves popping out all over the ficus.

Many of you know that the Board approved an improvement project to the left of 15 green in the area that was basically an over grown drainage ditch. I'm please to say that my team has taken a useless piece of land that used to swallow golf balls like my kids do jelly beans and turned it into a phenomenal improvement I'm sure everyone will appreciate.

This is the area before anything was done. I had some surveyors come out and define where the Club's property was.


The first order of business was to clear out the invasive pepper trees.




Next I had a drain pipe installed and fill hauled in to cover the pipe. Thanks to our friends at Moorings Park for supplying the dirt, and Dave Benson for arraigning for us to get it at no cost, I had almost 35 truck loads of dirt hauled in to fill the area.




Our next step is to irrigate the area on Monday and Tuesday of next week and then we will sod it hopefully Thursday. This is going to be a major improvement in the playability of the hole. When completed, if you go left of the green you can scramble to try and make par instead of praying you make bogey!

Lastly this last week, we have made major strides installing the new signage for the Club at the south entrance. It has been a challenge, but we are almost there. First, just to get the sign in the right spot we had to move two huge royal palms.


At the same time as the trees were being moved I had an electrician start the install for the new sign lighting system.


Once the trees were moved and the foundation was poured for the sign, it was time to install our new monument. Lykins Signtek created the sign for us and did a masterful job. The sign is actually made out of Styrofoam and covered in stucco! Two guys could on either end could pick it up.


Here is our new sign. Thanks Mr. Dean and Mr. Kikendall for making sure this project made it to the finish line for the Club. The sign is beautiful. The remaining landscaping and fencing will be completed next week, but first we still have to get a couple inspections done.


For now, I have removed the old sign and am storing it at my shop. The old flower area in front of the old sign will be landscaped off with grasses so that it blends in with the rest of the area.


Thankfully the summer rains have kicked into full swing and the course is loving it. We no longer have water shortages from the City of Naples as they will soon be looking for places to put all of the water produced. Thanks for everyone who did their nightly rain dances, I think it really helped.