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