Final Project Prep

Happy Memorial Day! My staff is in this morning to do the final herbicide application on the collars in preparation  for next week's putting surface reclamation project. Even though we have already sprayed the celebration grass twice to kill it and it looks pretty darn dead, there is still some green plant parts down in there if you look close. Hence the early morning holiday application of herbicide. The goal is to kill as much grass as we can before cutting it out. 

As a boy my father would always tell me that the better a job is prepared for, the better it turns out in the end. I hated it as a kid, but I can completely appreciate it now. 

Collar update....post Roundup application

Now that we are 7 day post application of the non-selective herbicide (meaning it kills everything) to the collars you can really see how much of the putting surface that has been lost. What is also very evident is how resilient the grass is in its ability to survive such an application. The Celebration grass's durability and tenacity is why it was chosen during the renovation in 2009. We knew back then that when we had to reclaim the putting surfaces, the very reasons why we wanted the grass in the fairways was going to make it a bear around the greens. 

All of the green haze within the kill zone is still actively growing Celebration grass, and this is exactly why we needed to get started killing the grass early. It is going to take multiple applications of herbicide to kill the plant significantly enough to make a putting surface reclamation project successful. If I do not kill the Celebration it will pop right back up on the putting surface from below where I cut it out and the whole endevour will be wasted. 

I'm guessing on the first application we got approximately 75% kill. So on May 16th, the first day the course is closed on Mondays, I will have the collars sprayed again. Then sprayed again on the 30th. Although we will never kill the grass 100% because we are not fumigating the perimeters, we will be able to achieve a kill rate in the upper 90% range. That will make anything that pops back up very manageable to remove.