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!