Greens speed, Gypsum and pit fall traps...

Most often a picture is worth a thousand words. I took several yesterday of the pin location on number one as many golfers complained to me sat. afternoon: "un-playable", 'worst I have ever seen' and so on. As previously stated here we mowed Thursday so this evened them out as well as removing some leaf tissue. All this will increase speed. We also rolled them Saturday and the wind was blowing about 20 or more. The point of all this is to explain the hazards of fast greens. It drastically reduces the available cupping areas of a green. Safe to marginal placements that will never even generate a comment now become the worst they have ever seen! think back to the US Open at Shinnecock Hills where the balls were rolling off the green in the afternoon. Some of the pins were in tough spaces but not worthy of the outcry in my opinion. I moved them keeping them in rotation and some ended being in tougher spots, in my opinion but with the wind laying down and no roll I never heard a peep! go figure

1 green. tough pin? I went to where the bucket is... much steeper



pit fall cover with gypsum pellets from last weeks app.



pit fall trap on fourth hole

a pitfall trap is simply a PVC pipe with a slit in the top that is placed in the ground that catches crawling insects that fall in the pit. The pipe is set at an angle and a removable catch basin of sorts is at the bottom. The catch is placed in an irrigation box for easy access. Mostly we are looking for annual bluegrass weevils which become active this time of year and lay their eggs in short turf. These off-spring are the ones that do the damage, much like beetle off-spring aka grubs. This monitoring allows us to pin point when to apply our control products exact to our location and get the best control. I was surprised to see the snow/rain which fell on the gypsum app did not melt it away. It has since broken down and it doing its job on our soil to reduce the soil salinity.

Will Warner doing some cart maint.

rain cover after removal

Will spent a few minutes going over the new golf carts that came in last week. Adding the new number decals and removing the rain covers that came on this years batch.