Maintenance week updates

In five days with the course all to ourselves, the maintenance staff worked long hours, took short breaks, and seamlessly moved from one job to the next.  I was proud of the crew for handling the hot weather and the intense work load.  The physical nature of our tasks last week left us all sore and tired but nobody called in sick or showed up late.  Monday we punched all the greens, Tuesday we focused on the collars until the sod cutter broke down.  New jobs went up on the board and within fifteen minutes, every staff member was out to their next assignment.  Really impressive in terms of efficiency.  When players returned to the course Saturday, I would have loved to have everything neat and trimmed, but we did not have time for that.  Next week we will do some fall cleaning.  Here is a list of our accomplishments during five closed days:

• All greens were aerified, fertilized, and sanded
• All collares were stripped, leveled, aerified, seeded, and topdressed
• All fairways were aerified.
• All tees were verticut and seeded, paspalum tees were also aerified
• A new bunker was installed on #2 and we handled the sod work
• Driving range tee, driving range floor, and chipping area were aerified
• Sand removed from #2 fairway bunker was added to the practice bunkers
• All fairways and primary rough were fertilized 

The greens were aerified using a quad tine setup on our Ryan aerifiers.  This means more holes and closer spacing.  This is a win-win for you and me.  I get more surface disruption and more thatch removed and you get faster recovery.  Below is a photo from Friday, four days after aerification and just a few hours after our first mowing.

This close up of the collars shows the seedlings beginning to emerge.  I took this picture of #9 on Saturday, four days after we finished the process.  The next shot was taken Sunday afternoon.  Ryegrass germinates and grows very quickly and you can see a difference in just a couple of hours.

The greens will get their second cut tomorrow afternoon.  The collars will fill in quickly and will be opened for play as soon as they can handle the traffic.  Thank you for your patience and for the soft foot steps the last couple of days.  Everything is coming along very nicely.