Fairway Aerification

Tomorrow we finish our early summer fairway aerification. We began May 4th and completed one to two fairways per day. Tomorrow we will complete the 6th fairway and that will be our last. There are many reasons and benefits to aerification. For us we aerify fairways this time of year for two predominate reasons:

1) Add create channels to allow oxygen to penetrate into the soil. By increasing the amount of oxygen we see an increase in soil temperature and an increase in the microbe activity. The increased microbe activity adds in the breakdown of organic matter in the soil. Organic matter in soil is the type of soil that gets sticky when wet and allows mud to stick to your ball. The increase in soil temperature encourages bermudagrass growth.

2) Aerification also allows sunlight to penetrate the turf canopy to where the bermudagrass shoots are beginning to grow after winter dormancy. Bermudagrass is a sun-loving grass and grows best with maximum sun light. Many agronomists, including me, argue that the biggest killer of bermudagrass is a lack of sunlight.

May is a busy month for the golf course. The days are longer and the weather is perfect, despite what Craig thinks, and therefore we do more rounds of golf this month than any other. Please do your part in keeping the course in great shape by filling divots and fixing ballmarks.

One last thing, if you wonder why I have not posted an entry in the past month please visit- www.laurenhertzing.blogspot.com

Congrats!

Congratulations to those who won their respective flights in the Men's and Senior's Club Championship. Once again it seems as though the golf course stood its' ground. I was pleased with the way the course was presented for the tournament. I felt for three weeks post aerification the greens rolled well and the course firmed up through the weekend to produce championship worthy conditions. I am very fortunate to have such an excellent staff that time and time again steps it up a notch for tournaments.
Moving on to this week. Today we began fairway aerification. Like in years past we will attack one or two fairways a day. By doing this we will have the fairways cleaned up and ready for play by 10 am. This week will be working on the back nine. Next week we will focus our attention to the front. Next week we will be starting play off #10 to allow us more time to work on the fairways prior to play. We conduct our semi annual aerification during the month of May to help encourage our transition to bermudagrass for the summer months. The aerification allows sunlight to penetrate the turf canopy and reach the emerging bermuda grass. In conjunction with aerification we will be applying a granular fertilizer for the bermudagrass and applying a growth regulator that will slow the growth of the ryegrass while not inhibiting the bermudagrass.
In addition to fairway aerification, we will also be verticutting and topdressing greens on Tuesday and Wednesday.

An Update on a busy week.

The picture of the yellow dot represents the hole locations for the Men's and Senior Club Championship this weekend. As you are out practicing and fine tuning your game this week you can check out the hole locations for the weekend. There are three dots on each green and you won't know which dot correlates to which day until the tournament gets here.

This is a busy week for the golf course.

On Maintenance day Monday we are aerifying the Driving Range and re-distributing sand in the bunkers. Both of these are time consuming projects and require most of our labor for these two tasks.

Tuesday is Ladies Team. We will be double cutting and rolling the greens for the ladies and their opponents. Beginning Tuesday afternoon and continuing on for a few days we will be having a golf course photographer out taking a few photos of the course. His name is Aidan Bradley and his work can be seen at www.golfcoursephotography.com

The rest of week we will be preparing the course for the first major of the year.

The greens are 95% healed from aerification. As the week progresses and we continue to roll the greens, our speeds will be back to normal and we will be ready for the busy months of May and June.

Dan Forsman Note

I recently recieved a note from Dan Forsman, 2009 AT&T Champions Classic Winner, that I would like to share with everyone:

Dear Robert,
Please accept this check as a "Thank you" to you and your amazing staff who worked so hard to prepare the awesome Valencia Country Club for the AT&T Championship. The golf course was in tremendous condition and I particularly liked the 18th green. My wife Trudy and I were hoping perhaps you could host a BBQ or special gathering for for you and your staff who worked so hard during the tournament week and all year long.
We know you will do what makes sense and please thank everyone for their hard work and kindness. They say it was the last, but we are sure hopeful it won't have been. We dearly want to come back.
Robert, please invite Craig and his staff as well as others you would like, as they all worked so hard and made the week extra special for all of us.
Warm Regards,
Dan

Aerification Begins!

We started aerification yesterday. We completed deep tining all of the greens and aerification on the putting and chipping green. This morning we begin finishing the aerification process on #1 and will be working in order. Typically we finish nine holes today and nine holes tomorrow. However, due to the rain in the forecast for tonight and continuing into tomorrow we will be aerifying as many greens as possible today.
Our Spring time aerification is a 12 step process:
1. Deep tine using a 3/4" diameter tine that goes 9" into the ground.
2. Roll green to smooth any tuffing from the deep tine machine.
3. Aerify greens and approaches. We are using 1/2" diameter tines on a 1.5" x 1.5 inch spacing.
4. Pick up plugs. This is done the old fashion way with scoop shovels and muscle.
5. Blow clean green surface.
6. Verticut green.
7. Mow green with groomers in the on position.
8. Top dress with #30 silica sand. It takes about 100 tons to cover 190,000 sq.ft.
9. Drag green to work sand into holes
10. Use power brushes attached to a triplex greens mower help smooth sand over entire surface.
11. Apply fertilizer. Nutrients quanites are applied based on soil and tissue tests.
12. Irrigate one heavy cycle to help settle sand into the holes and start the recovery process.

April Fools week

Just wanted to give a quick update as to what is happening on the course this week.

• We are aerifying roughs in traffic areas. We will finish aerification this week and then apply wetting agents and soluble calcium. This process should help keep our high traffic area looking good well into the summer. The photo shows the aerified rough between the cart path and fairway near #18 green.
• Thursday morning we grounded the stump on #2. We will be cleaning this up and sodding the area. We will then be adding 2 pines in that area.
• We added an irrigation head in # 5 fairway. We have a historically dry zone in #5 fairway that we continually have add supplemental water. To help eliminate the constant hand watering of this area we have added an irrigation head that we be controlled from our irrigation system.
• We prepping all of our machines for greens and approach aerification next week. Aerification will be just like last year's Spring aerification. We will utilize deep tines along with shallow hollow tines and then filling the holes with sand. Estimated full recovery is 11 to 12 days. I will post more on aerification in the next few days.
• One final thing, we have added 3 stalls at the range. Due to the season and the quick recovery time in the spring we can accommodate more stalls. When the heat of the summer kicks in and turf recovery slows we will have to re-evaluate our range stall situation.

Wild Week of Weather!

Last Thrusday we hit 87.5 degrees, then we cooled off by Sunday to 53 degrees and 4/10" of rain. Following rain Monday brought us winds that hit 45 mph. Now that the wind has subsided we have hit 30 degrees that last two mornings. These are big swings that keep us on our toes when it comes to managing the golf course.

The winds brought one casuality:

This is the pine that was on #2 hole about 100 yds from the green right of the fairway.

The winds also left us with a lot of debris to clean up. In addition to cleaning up debris this week, we have aerified tees, verticut and topdressed greens and repaired a main line irrigation break behind #14 green.