Clubhouse Green regrass update

As many of you know, the Clubhouse putting green is scheduled for a minor rebuild this summer.  The reason for the needed repair is due to the incorrect initial construction.  When building a green, regardless of surface elevation changes, the soil profile is to remain the same.  This means there should a consistent 12-14 inches of green's mix regardless of contours.  In the picture below you can see the different amounts of sand in the profile of the green in the middle core (taken from the hump in the middle of the green) from the core on the right (taken on the #1 tee side).  The core on the left was taken from the chipping green on the front right hump, it's the worst by far.  The tiles on the floor are 18 inches wide and you can see the amount of mix in the cores is way too much.  Uniformity is key within a green's profile to maximize water uniformity.

The process to repair the Clubhouse green is pretty simple.  The golf maintenance staff will use a sod cutter to strip off the existing grass.  Once all of the existing grass is removed, stakes will be marked with a line about 4 inches from the bottom and another at 12 and 14 inches above the bottom line.  The stakes will be installed into the drainage layer of the green up to the bottom line.  Once all of the stakes have been installed and a grid has been laid out on the green, it will be time to remove the excess soil using the top two lines on the stakes as a guide to keep within parameters.  Once the entire green is within the acceptable soil depth range we will float the green out to smooth all the surface cuts, fumigate and grass.

Due to all of the rain that has been pounding the State as of late, the fumigation company is way behind schedule and can't fit in my small 5000 square foot project.  Therefore, it looks like the putting green project will be getting underway the first part of July and fumigation will take place during the week we are closed to aerify the course.  This actually works out better.  Once the green has been fumigated, grassing will take place directly afterwards and the grow-in should take about 8-10 weeks.  

Gordon River Extension Update

The contractor has begun the final phase of the project. As you'll see in the pictures, the new excavated canal banks are being stabilized with rock starting at the existing control weir installed many, many years ago. The first 150 feet is all complete but it was also the most difficult. The process should gain speed now.

Meet Louise Skelly, our new Golf Professional

Assistant Louise Skellyhas started and hopefully everyone has received the CCN email blast with herbrief bio.

Louise grew up in Maryland and started playing golf at theage of eight. She participated in many golf tournaments leading up to highschool where she was the only girl member on an all boys golf team. Louiseattended Coastal Carolina for a year and then transferred to Florida Gulf CoastUniversity where she was a member of the women’s golf team as well as arecipient of the PGA scholarship award. While attending FGCU she majored inResort and Hospitality Management with a concentration in Professional GolfManagement.  She also worked as an Internat both Pinehurst Golf Resort and The Pebble Beach Company. During herinternships she was able to learn from some of the top teachers in golf. Shewas very active in the Pinehurst teaching academy and assisted in theoperations of the Women’s North/South Amateur along with the U.S. Kids GolfChampionship. Louise was the first female to graduate from the ProfessionalGolf Management Program at FGCU. Louise graduated from FGCU in 2009 with adegree in Resort and Hospitality Management along with her PGA Class AMembership. After college she worked at Tiburon until moving out to SouthernCalifornia to pursue a job at Matrix Shafts, one of the leading shaft companieson the PGA Tour. She is very excited about her return to the Southwest Floridaarea and her opportunity to work with the staff and members at The Country Clubof Naples.

Clubhouse improvements

Progress continues in the Clubhouse maintenance program as well.  This past week was all about the high stuff.  I rented two 20 foot lifts to get to the ceilings of the Clubhouse for very much needed repairs and maintenance.  First on the list was to clean and paint the air conditioning vents in the two dining rooms. 


Step one was to remove the grills.

Step two was to clean the dust and grease off of the vents.  You'd be surprised how greasy they were from table side dining smoke and fumes over the years. 

Fresh off the ceiling

Freshly cleaned and painted

A little fresh paint

While Roberto was up in the air, I had him clean all of the other vents and air conditioning returns.  This return was very dirty, you can see all of the black dust covered with grease clinging to the grill cover.

The is a vent installed to remove smoke and fumes from the table side dining events that hadn't been cleaned in a long time

Another project I had Roberto do while up in the air was to clean all of the lighting shelves around the perimeters of the rooms and change out the mish-mash of different colored lights.  Now all of the white, yellow and what ever else colored light was laying around when needed have been changed out to a cool white color. Now the room has a nice clean feel by just changing the colored lights.  Also, by changing the bulbs we now know which ones work and which ones don't work.  Believe it or not, some of the ones not working just needed new bulbs.

In this picture you can see the color difference with the new bulbs.

new lights on the left, old ones on the right

All of the vents and returns in the main dining room, mixed grill and grill room have been cleaned and painted.  Also, all of the lights have been changed out to the new cool white bulb in all three rooms. There's lots that have been happening behind the scenes to scrub, polish and and improve the operations and feel of the Clubhouse.

First Assualt in the 100 Day War Completed

I'm happy to report that the Golf Maintenance Department team has complete our first aerification week without a hitch. I think we would all agree that we need rain desperately, but during aerification week it is best if the weather is hot and dry! The reason being, much like everything else in life, is that it is much harder to clean the place up than it is to make the mess. For us, when "the mess" dries out it becomes really easy to clean up because the grass plugs and debris do not stick together. We are able to break up the plugs and separate the dirt and sand from the organic plugs. The process of separating the sand from the organics makes it easier to cleanup because it removes a lot of the weight of the debris. So hot and dry is good when aerifying!

Our first priority of the week was to verti-cut the and aerify the greens. This time, instead of verti-cutting the greens once we verti-cut them twice in and "X" pattern. Since it was our first aggressive maintenance of the year I wanted to take the opportunity to try and eliminate as much thatch in the upper profile as possible. This is the business side of the machine. Notice the teeth are lined up vertical, like a roto-tiller. The teeth penetrate 1/8" into the turf canopy to just get at the dead material building up on the surface. They are not digging deep.



Here is a picture of the green's verti-cutter hard at work. All of the material the verti-cutter digs out is cleaned off.


The next step after verti-cutting is to clean off the debris. Most of the time we will just mow behind the first machine, but because there was so much stuff removed we just used a big blower and blew the stuff into the roughs.


After verti-cutting the greens and cleaning them up, it was time to aerify the putting surface. We use hollow tines to pull cores out of the green.



After the putting surface is aerified, all of the cores are removed. The aerification process serves two functions, remove compaction and remove organics in the soil profile. Here is a picture of the green's upper profile area. The darker area at the top is the organics that have built up over time and what needs to be controlled. You want some of this but not too much, which can lead to a lot of problems. This is what the hollow tines of the aerifier pull out. My goal through the course of the aerification season is to remove 30-45% of this material each year which should maintain a good balance of playability and agronomics.


Here the green has been aerified and it is time to remove the cores. Removing the old cores is a labor intensive job as it is all done by hand.


Core removal is a simple process. The staff uses these floating level lawn tools and slides them along the putting surface and pushes the cores to the outside edges of the greens. Once the green is cleaned off the crew scoops up the cores, puts them into carts, and hauls the material off.


The same process done to the greens (verti-cutting, aerification, and sanding) was done to the tees, approaches, and fairways. This year due to the intense tournament schedule we didn't do our normal fairway verti-cutting.  Instead we used more of the same approach we use on the greens and lightly groomed all the tees, fairways, collars and approaches.  I didn't want to rip the grass to shreds like last year and chance that it would recover in time with all the expected weather.

We still had grain issues in the fairways. So the grooming was done to control more grain issues as compared to de-thatching the soil profile.  You still go from the swirled look of the grain


To what looks like I completely killed the golf course

Fear not, it will come back with a vengeance and be lush green

Here's what all that grain looks like once removed. In this picture I wanted to give you and idea of how much material was removed so I put my radio next to the debris generated. My radio is ten inches tall from the base to the top of the antenna. Pay close attention to how many stems are in the picture (all the brown stuff), and how little actual green stuff (leaf tissue) there is. All of the stems come from the grass laying over which creates the grain in the fairways.



You have heard me talk about sanding greens and have seen the postings I do, but what I haven't talked about much is the need to continually sand the tees, approaches, and fairways. The sand is what keeps the surfaces firm. Think of when you go to the beach and the waves wash up on the shore then all of the sudden they are gone, the water just seems to get sucked into the sand but the sand still stays firm. That is similar to what we want to happen on our tees, fairways, and approaches when water is applied. Although we want the soil to hold some moisture, I'd rather it drain really well for increased playability. Remember when we opened after the renovation and on every drive you would get 25 yards of roll after the ball landed? All of the extra roll was due to the ball hitting the turf that had not built up an excess of organics in the soil. So just like the greens, the other "short grass" areas need to have a strong soil management protocol as well. That management protocol includes regimented verti-cuttings, aerifications, and topdressings.

Another reason to maintain the fairways so firm is because of the over-all design of the course. The Country Club of Naples is a classic ground game style course. Meaning our course was designed to be able to bounce or run a ball onto the green. Every green here has a very large approach that enables the player to land short and still get the ball onto the putting surface. The only hole that you have to hit over a hazard when hitting to the green is hole 15, but the approach is 25 yards long. Additionally, the firm fairways allow for extra yardage off the tee. If you got an extra 25 yards of roll on 14 holes (the par 4 & 5's) that's an extra 350 yards you didn't have to hit the ball, and that's only on your drives. So you can see that maintaining a firm fairway can be a very good thing, but it takes a continual effort to keep it. Over time if the fairways are not maintained properly for firmness they will become softer and softer.

This past week I used approximately 384 tons of sand to top dress the fairways.

During our aerification process of the fairways in the past, we would find some of the remaining rocks that are close to the surface and the staff would dig around the large boulders and then they were removed and sodded over. This year we did not find any rocks that were large enough to dig up. All of those years of digging out the rocks has paid off!!!


No rocks found like this during the closure.  I think we finally dug them all out!!!

Now it's time for some fertilizer and a little sunshine.  I've got two weeks to get the course in shape for the Jr. Open Qualifier.  Stressed....you could say a little!

G.R.E. update

Just came back from checking up on the G.R.E. project, the dirt moving is about to begin.  The contractor has cleared all the way to the headwaters of the river extension and is preparing to start excavating out.

Hopefully by Wednesday the contractor will be in full excavation mode.  The dirt removed in the picture above is being used to create a haul road over all of the swampy area in the easement CCN gave the County.  Once the road is built, the contractor's truck's will be able to back right up to the excavator.  When moving earth, in order to maximize speed and efficiency it is important to have to handle the material as little as possible.  This means when the excavator scoops the dirt it is best to put it immediately into a truck.  You do not want to make a pile and then have another machine come pick it up again to put it into a truck.  Like all things, the better the preparation the better the end result.  Once the road is in and the dirt starts moving, it will go very fast.

Here you can see why the haul road is needed.  The mud is about half way up the tracks of the excavator.