A couple projects and a plea to have your voices heard

We continue to tackle a few projects this year while the weather cooperates. I did a post back in Jan 2011 called "root-pruning-in-january" that was number one all time in views for years. It resides as number two with 522 right now. It showed the process of stripping the sod and cutting a trench to sever the roots of the tree where they grow into the putting green. We had done the first green right around the same time and it is due again. I tried to use the same trench but obviously missed it as you can see by the number of rocks we pulled out.

root pruning

some roots but also lots of rocks 

Right side of first green

ripples still visible form Sept aerifying

drought stress during summer same area

Trees and turf do not get along well. I get a lot of questions about how to improve people's lawns and 90% of them are shade/tree related. The above pictures show the stressed turf in the summer and then the damage done by the aerification we did in September. The tree roots under the green compete for water and nutrients and the turf suffers. Trees are great but not when they are so close to a playing surface. We fight the acorns, twigs, leaves and roots. The cost to maintain these areas is much higher than if the trees were not allowed to grow so close. The next time you wonder why it is so expensive to play golf think about all that it takes to maintain the property and speak out if you are OK with a bit of tree removal. The vocal minority has worked hard to get there point across that no tree should ever come down. Makes our job a lot harder. I am not looking for a deforestation but we have a handful of silly trees that should be removed. A few of them were planted as 150 shrubs and now are obsolete and deter from how the course plays. Others have grown so tall they block much needed sunlight from green surfaces.

Collage of fairway drainage posted on Twitter @22crowther

from the cab of the bobcat 8 fairway

As many of you know the course drains very well. We have a few spots that collect a bunch of water and puddles form. The largest of these areas we have installed french drains or simply dug holes deep enough to get into coarse sand and installed pipe and sometimes stone to facilitate the percolation of these puddles. To handle some of the smaller areas we have had success with drilling smaller holes and removing the topsoil and subsoil and filling the hole with coarse sand. We did this to a few of these areas on 1,8 and 4 fairways drilling approximately 30 holes.

We also had a new Comcast phone system installed this week as well. It has an auto attendant which directs you to different extensions and voice mailboxes. This should solve the issues they had with the phones this summer and possibly even improve the communications. Have a great Holiday season everyone and keep checking in for updates throughout the Winter.