Aerification has gone well at Grand Pines the past two days.  We pulled 3/4" plugs on 4x4 spacing on all 18 fairways.  We let the plugs dry to a point that we could then verticut all these plugs, which break apart the soil and thatch, and then mow off the fairways.  I firmly believe that this will allow for better turf going forward.  This process took approximately 50 hours to complete.  On our greens, due to a heavy organic layer that is about 4" deep, we covered the greens in approximately 0.25" of sand and deep tined all greens.  These tines were 3/4" in diameter and 8" long.  We were able to break through this organic layer with these tines to promote vertical drainage and then drug the sand into these holes to keep them open and allow for proper vertical drainage. Today we pulled cores off the greens with 0.5" tines on a 2x2 spacing.  These plugs were allowed to dry and then we followed that up with verticutting.  We pulverized these plugs to generate the needed sand to final fill all holes in greens.  We will finish approaches on Thursday as well as start running our slicer airway machine in the rough.

Having said all this, there was a lot of poking of holes in this beautiful golf course.  This will promote better gas exchange into the root zone, alleviate compaction as well as providing a healthier stand of turfgrass throughout the remainder of the year.

What to expect:  We will be opening the course on Saturday June 3rd.  You should expect some sandy greens.  We will grow through this in the coming days, but on Saturday, there will still be quite a bit of sand remaining on the greens.  We will heal up from this and I think you will be very happy with the results.  Thank you for your patience.

Donny Latham

Hello all, I apologize for my lack of posting.  We have completed several projects around all 3 courses over the last 18 days.  The synopsis is as follows.

Miller Renovation:

All greens are now irrigated and are awaiting approval of rough shaping from Scott Miller.  He is on site today and so far 1-10 have been approved along with lengthy discussions about the bunker liner and edges that is preferred going forward.  We will relatively steep faced bunkers with clean edged lines all around.  This look has been made famous by a little course in Augusta, Georgia that hosts a fairly important golf tournament.  We will do our best to emulate these steep smoothed faces.  This will be made possible by installing Bunker Solutions liner.  This type of liner will allow us to maintain the steep faces with sand splashed up to the lip.  We have been working on smoothing out many of the pine straw beds to allow safer shots to be hit from these areas.  Next week we will begin spraying herbicides to eliminate many of the grassy weeds that have invaded this course over the years. 

Weiskopf Update:

We have made some improvements to our collars on 9,18 and the Putting Green.  Over the next several weeks we will work closely with the construction team from Cole Sanders Golf Group sod cutting these collars out, re-grade the collar dams and applying of sod.  We ask for your patience as we eliminate many of these eye sores.  The greens have improved significantly over the last 2 weeks from new mowing methods as well as mother nature turning the heat up.  These TifEagle greens respond to full hot sun than we experienced during the month of April.  Also, we will be topdressing these greens weekly lightly to smooth the ball roll and to help eliminate any detrimental thatch accumulation that could occur from the higher amounts of fertility currently being applied weekly.  The fairways have also started to respond from recent fertility applications.  We will continue to work to create a dense mat of turf that allows your ball to sit up in these closely mown areas.  I am excited to see how this course will respond over the coming months. 

Grand Pines:

We will be closing the course Tuesday May 30th and re-opening June 3rd.  We will be punching holes in everything but the cart path.  We will aerify greens, tees, collars, approaches, fairways and rough.  After these holes are punched we will then heavily fertilize the entire golf course.  We will aerify these greens with deep tines to allow for better vertical movement of water through the profile as well alleviating compaction.  Once these greens have been aerified we will harvest many of the plugs that come up from core aerfication and push those into the large areas of dead turf.  This will take approximately 4 to recover to a championship putting quality, but in my opinion, this will be a shorter time frame to recover from sod seams.  We will be laying sod in all of the smaller areas but the larger areas we will be growing in from plugs.  I have had a few complaints about rocks in some of these bunkers.  Starting the week of May 22, we will have a more concentrated effort to hand rakes these and remove any rocks we come across.  This will take us a week or so to complete, but I feel we can make these hazards certainly more playable.

That concludes my updates for this week.  As always, feel free to email me with any questions at dlatham@bentwaterclub.com or here at bentwaterturf@gmail.com.  Look forward to seeing you out on the golf courses.

Donny Latham

Well it is finally May.  The month that we typically start to grow grass.  April is always a tough month, with Spring temperatures still hovering in the lower 50's for much of the month.  Bermuda grass requires a few things before it becomes an actively growing plant.  First it needs the soil temps to be above 65 degrees.  This is usually the easiest of the requirements, but it also needs a full 8-10  hours of direct sunlight.  Both increased light intensity and day length increase rhizome, stolon and leaf growth in bermudagrass.  The false sense of growth we typically see in April is simply from the increased chlorophyll production.  This means the grass greens up but really isn't actively growing.  However, in May, all these important factors are in place.  We applied 20,000 pounds of fertilizer on the Weiskopf golf course last week on all fairways, roughs and tees.  The Miller course also received 15,000 pounds of fertilizer on all tees, fairways and rough as well as Grand Pines.  I am anticipating a boost in growth and green up over the next week due to this fertilizer app.

I have been asked when are the greens and collars going to recover from the damage suffered over the last few months.  These collars on Weiskopf are scheduled to be started on Tuesday May 2.  We will begin removing the dead material as well as a couple of inches of sand/soil.  Once this is removed we will add new sand/soil mix to these and resod.  Our plan is start on the Putting Green, #9 and #18.  Once these three have been completed we will start to move our way throughout the course.  I ask for your patience as we remedy these eye sores.  Large areas of greens will be resodded on the Grand Pines course.  I wish I could say that we will "grow out of this" but that is simply not the case.  We will remove these large areas of dead turf and prep them for sod.  As we bring in sod we will carefully place into the greens.  These areas will remain GUR as we grow them in.  We will have to aggressively topdress these areas all summer to erase the visible sod seams.  Our goal is to have all of these greens repaired before June 1.  I will keep you all posted on our progress.  Look forward to seeing you all on the courses.

Donny Latham

The following summarizes the work efforts during the fourth week of the Miller Project:

(1) Finished hauling sand to all repaired greens and rototilled into existing rootzone

(2) Fummigated all repaired greens as well as approximately 4,000 SF of existing nursery green by maintenance facility

(3) Finished rough shaping of 4 and 13 greens and new PG

(4) Installed drainage and gravel blanket on 4 green

(5) Began excavation of irrigation heads

(6) Expanded 13 green shaping and bunkers as per architects direction

(7) Began bunker work on 7 green

(8) Scott Miller's visit on Monday through Wednesday approved subgrades on 4,13, and PG

(9) Began cutting sod on tees to be repaired

(10) Initial layout of irrigation heads on 4,13 and PG

 

Donny Latham