Closure #2 - feeling dead but rising

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!