Leveling the playing field

Over the years as the greens are top dressed, it is inevitable that the collars begin to get what is called the "sand dam."  This is caused from the process of dragging in the sand after a sand top dressing of the putting surface. The collars have a longer leaf blade than the putting surface and therefore grab and hold more sand as the brush that is used to drag the sand is turned on the collars. Notice in this picture how the ends of the level are not touching the turf, this "bump" in the middle of the level is called the sand dam. 

Since we are redoing the perimeter of the collars I thought it would be a good time to go in and rectify the problem of the sand damn. The traditional method of eliminating the sand dam is sod cutting off the turf, leveling the sub grade by hand, and then putting back the turf. This is a very labor-intensive and long, arduous process. 

In recent years a new method has been devised in order to be able to eliminate the sand dam in one easy process without having to remove the turf to get to the subgrade. Essentially what is done is use a machine that has a very wide swath that cuts on a level plane perpendicular to the bump in order to flatten out any bumps along the way. The machine has hundreds of super fast rotating flat knives that act like little scoops, only remove what is sticking up too high. 

The end result is what looks like a divot, just five feet wide. You can see in the picture the green grass that is left within the machine's swath. These areas are areas that are little bit low and therefore did not have anything removed.   The picture is of a test pass that was done on the putting green by 1 tee. The white lines are the edge of the putting surface we are going to reclaim. 

So we all know that next week is aerification week, or the start of the 100 Day War as I like to call it, and that means the Club is closed. It would seem this time however, Mother Nature isn't going to play nice with us. On Monday and Tuesday of next week it is supposed to rain due to a tropical disturbance that is going to be moving up from the Mexican peninsula.  The weather disturbance is forecasted to intensify quickly and possibly become a tropical storm by Tuesday. 

Well what does all this have to do with leveling out the sand dams around the edges of the greens you ask? Simple....I have borrowed the machine that does the leveling process and need to get it back to the Club that loaned it to me. So, because of all of the weather that is forecasted we are going to go ahead and level the collars over the weekend instead of on Monday morning. The leveling machine is scheduled to go back on Tuesday and returning it can't be delayed. 

For those playing this weekend you will notice that some of the colors appear to be scalped out a little bit more beyond the edges of the dead green's  perimeters. It will have no effect on play and will be only a visual disturbance. Moving up the sand dam removal process a few days is a necessary evil to ensure that we maintain our schedule for achieving all of our economic goals for the summer.