The tee renovations are all complete and the sprigs are growing. Growing so much so that we are already mowing the newly planted grass. To ensure that the tees are level when they open for play and not all clumpy like they are now, a lot has to be done. The basic principle pretty simple, take the top down and bring the bottom up at the same time...along with some verti-cutting and other things. As the cut is lowered it will purposefully scalp off the mounds of grass, and sanding every week will fill the voids giving a smooth surface for the grass to grow on.
Fresh planted
Little over a wk old
The purpose of the tee renovations was to increase the available teeing ground to accommodate the golfing demands of the club. In 2009 when the course was redesigned we were only playing 25,000 rounds of golf so the smaller tee sizes worked. Now that the club is full, or nearly full, we are playing over 30,000 (probably closer to 35,000) rounds and the smaller tees were not able to spread out the wear enough. What was left behind essentially was perpetual divot during the winter months, not much different than the range tee. Too much use and not enough area to spread it out.
To solve the problem I consulted with the golf course architect, Gordon Lewis, about making some adjustments and we came up with the current shape and size of the renovated tees. These very large teeing grounds should give ample room to spread wear out and provide sufficient time for the grass to recover during the winter golfing season. Remember, these are par 3 tees and most people are taking large divots which require time to heal.
Although the vast majority of the changes to the new teeing grounds are completed, there are a few items left to do to wrap up the projects. The new teeing ground on 6 still needs to have some landscape grasses added at the bottom of the new tee slopes to tie into the existing landscaping. On hole 12, I will be adding a few trees between 11 fairway and 12 tee. Not many as I don't want to create a shade issue again, but some to give just the slightest hint of separation between holes.
The range tee is healing in quickly and should produce a fantastic hitting surface. The tee is basically in a grow-in mode. There's lots of new growth filling in.
Day after leveling
Today
In other news, it has been raining constantly! The constant rain has played havoc on my plans to complete some of the items that would normally be done during the closure week - like sanding fairways. The ground is so saturated that it is becoming difficult to even mow, let alone drag a loaded sand trailer around. The only good thing about all the rain is that it is showing us where we need to do a drainage project, or two, or six. This next intermission between aerifications will be concentrated on landscape trimming and leveling of sprinklers and drains. Fortunately none of that work requires machinery so the soggy ground should not be an issue.
This past week has been one of the hardest aerification weeks I have experienced in nearly 20 years of golf course maintenance. The relentless rain, tremendous work load and my uncompromising expectations for the week kept the pace at a breakneck speed. The good news is although we are not ahead like usual, we are not slipping too far behind.
A lot of this past week's focus was vertical mowing the fairways, tees and green's followed by aerifying. This is a massive endeavor, let alone to do it in 5 or 6 days. "What about the 7th day?" you might be thinking. The 7th day is needed to put the golf course back together just so it's playable. We have to blow out all the bunkers and repair the edges, put back all of the yardage markers that were removed for aerifications, reset all the pins, tees, trash cans, and all sorts of stuff that gets removed in preparation for aerification week. So out of this week's closure I really only have 6 days, and those 6 days were filled with a lot of set backs.
Due to the Celebration grass's aggressive growth habit, it generates a lot of thatch and grain. To manage all of this it is imperative to heavily vertical mow the turf. This is what heavy vertical mowing looks like. My rule of thumb is if the material isn't flying at least as high as the canopy of the tractor then we are not going deep enough.
Here is a video of how aggressive the fairway vertical mowing is. For those up north, you should show this to your Supt up there. Be careful though, he might freak out!
The resulting mess then had to be cleaned up. I rent 3 turf vacuums, plus use the one I have to clean it all up
All of the vertical mowing produces a tremendous amount of thatch that needs to be hauled off. In total approximately 450-500 cubic yards of dead thatch and material will be removed. This is just a few hours worth of material from vacuuming the fairways post vertical mowing.
Then, after cleaning up the verti-cutting we aerify everything making another huge mess, have to vacuum up all of that as well, then we come in and circle cut down the remaining grass to eliminate grain. It's a huge under taking, but it's worth it.
Circle cutting is not a real fun job. It's hot, dirty, it's a you go home with dust where it shouldn't be type job.
This is why is called circle cutting
this is not CCN, just a great pic to show circle cutting
Circle cutting is a very aggressive style of cutting because the cutting unit isn't riding flat across the surface, it's being forced into the canopy by the "turn" of the machine. It is a great way to really attack the excessive grain of the grass during times of active growth.
Nearly everyday though, it has rained. Not your typical summer rain where you think to yourself "Oh, look honey it's raining." It has rained like the end of days type rain, massive quantities in very violent fashion. All of the heavy rains didn't do the course any favors. Lots of washout in bunkers, lots of flooding, lots of washout on newly sodded areas.
soil wash out under new sod
Despite all of the adverse weather, the crew persevered daily and just repaired the previous day's damage and made daily progress. Some of the great progress made was on the teeing ground renovations of holes 6 & 12. The only thing we have left to do for these two huge projects is install the cart path material on hole 12. All of the construction and grassing is done.
hole 6 from start to finish
starting to fill in the low areas
adding more dirt to expand the tee north
this was all landscaping
rail road tie curbing installed on the new blue/white tee #6
grassed with sprigs
grassing complete
aerial view over 6 tee, the front and middle of the tee is almost 3 times as wide
Hole 12 start to finish
stripping the tee from the red to the back of the white
grassing complete on this huge tee
aerial view of 12 over the back tee
We also completed moving the cart path away from the green on 5
clearing out all of the trees in the way of the new cart path
new cart path area filled, cart path material installed and ready to grass
laying sod from the old cart path edge to the new cart path
project complete
Last Thursday, during the course closure, the Club hosted another Celebration field day for turf managers across the state. There were 30 guys that showed up from all across Naples and Ft. Myers, some from the east coast and even the two USGA agronomists in Florida attended. It was a great day to share ideas and showcase our maintenance practices as a template for others to build their programs from.
One of the new practices the USGA wanted to showcase is what is called Fraze mowing. This is a cultural practice that has come out of the sports field area that is being adapted to golf. Essentially when you Fraze mow you are milling the surface off at a specific thickness. Think of how roads are milled down before being repaved....same concept, only a smaller machine.
approx. 1.25" milled off
As you can see in the picture above, the road milling analogy is very accurate. This pass is about 1.25 inches deep. The purpose of going so deep on the range tee is to try to level it out somewhat. Over the years of daily random sand applications to the divots the tee has become very, very bumpy (or wavy). Traditionally there is no way of correcting this without stripping the entire tee, laser grading, and then regrassing. Now with the invention of these new machines it is possible to laser plan the tees regularly to prevent from having to do a traditional re-grass. All of the stems left behind as seen in the picture will sprout new leaves and the turf will recover in a 3-4 weeks.
Even though I had the top 1.25 inches of the tee removed, you can see from this aerial picture that there are still several low spots indicated by the green patches. The milling process will fix the entire tee if you keep going deeper, but that will eliminate all of the needed grass rhizomes for recovery. If the tee is truly pot holed like ours was, it will take several years to level it back out and still have some grass left to regrow from.
green spots mean the area was more than 1.25" below the rest of the area.
Some of the green spots were really low, as in the case of this sprinkler head. This head was leveled to the teeing ground two years ago, but is now still 4-5 inches low. That's how much sand is added annually to the range tee.
Having the range tee Fraze mowed served two purposes: 1) to level the tee somewhat 2) to generate sprigs for the new par 3 tees being renovated. The Fraze mowing machine generates spectacular sprigs as it pulverizes the thick grass on the tee into perfect sprigs, and then shoots it out the conveyor belt. Check out this video of what happens to the turf as it is Fraze mowed. It is literally a sod to sprigs conversion.
I will take weekly aerial pictures of the range tee to show how fast the grass recovers. Think of the turf loss like one enormous divot!
During this past week's closure the staff successfully finished recapturing the putting surface perimeters on the back nine. After only one month the new perimeters on the front were nearly grown in, so there's no reason to not expect a rapid establishment and grow-in for the back nine as well.
#11 perimeter freshly replanted with aerification cores
#2 putting surface perimeter after only 30 days being planted
Another great thing that happened this past week I'm sure all the people who use the pool will love is the conversion of the pool from a traditional chlorine pool to a salt water pool. No longer will liquid chlorine be used to keep the pool clean. These new units will spilt the ionized salt molecule back into their separate atoms of sodium and chlorine. The chlorine atom keeps the pool sanitized and then the two ions will eventually bond back together to form salt. This type of system is not hard on swimmer's clothes, hair, or eyes. Salt is silky they say! Due to the size of the pool and production capacity of the units, two units had to be installed to keep up with the sanitation demands of that much water.
As many of you know I am good friends with the Superintendent at Royal Poinciana. He and I were talking last week and he told me that RP is getting ready to start landscaping the median island from Goodlette up to the entrance of RP. I'm happy to say that today they started to install the underground infrastructure in the median. It won't be long before the entire median will be landscaped from Goodlette Road to Burning Tree Drive.
Don't forget to check out the clubhouse renovation blog at Clubhouse renovation . There's lots going on everywhere around here!
