Cutting down the natural areas/marsh

The last few years we have hand cut down the natural areas/marshes using machetes, weedeaters and brush cutters. We did this in late July/early August and it took at least a week with 5 employees 8+ hrs a day each. We had over 40 man hours in this work. It was a terrible job with snakes and other animals. When we were done it didn't look good and took the rest of the year to grow back and was tall in the spring. Today we took the brush hog out and cut down the area in front of 13 Weiskopf tee. It took around an hour. We will continue at 13 green and between 14 fairway and green tomorrow and will have less than 6 man hours in the project and it looks really good. This will give those areas a fresh start in the spring.

Cutting the marsh/natural area at 13 Weiskopf Tee

Snow mold control and topdressing

On Monday and Tuesday we were able to spray 57+ Acres of greens, tees and fairways on both golf courses with our preventative snow mold fungicides. This is a huge application that needs to last 4+ months. The day after the snow mold fungicide was applied to the greens, a light/medium sand topdressing was put down to provide a little insulation to the crown of the plant in the winter.

Spraying snow mold fungicide on #2 Devlin Fairway.  The foam dots allow us to see what has been sprayed and what has not.

Ben Thomas topdressing #16 Weiskopf green

Ball marks

While spraying greens yesterday I noticed an overwhelming amount of ball marks on the greens. It is very important to fix ball marks as we are not out repairing and mowing everyday. Now that the snow mold application is down greens will no longer be mowed until spring.

#11 Green - Please repair

#18 Weiskopf - You can see how many unrepaired ball marks are in this small area

Deep Tine

We finished the deep tine on the Devlin greens yesterday afternoon. We have an outside company(PerkAir) come in with two machines to get it done in one day. The Devlin greens are old "push-up" greens meaning they are made out of native soil pushed up to shape them. Deep tining allows air and water to break through a hard pan layer and create channels. We go down around 6-7 inches and it makes a huge difference in the spring. We lightly topdress, drag and roll the putting surface after the deep tining. If we continue with this warm weather and get a little growth we will topdress again to protect the crown before winter weather hits.

Surface after deep tining, topdressing, dragging and rolling

#17 Devlin Green afterwards.  Looks great except for all the oak trees still with leaves on them

Course Update

With all the rain and wind today a lot of leaves came down which is a good thing. The next few days the wind is supposed to blow 25-35mph which will continue dropping leaves. It will be hard to get tractors, blowers and mowers out to clean up leaves the next few days with how wet the ground is. We will do all we can to backpack blow the greens off and keep the course as playable as possible. Going forward, we we only have one course open for play per day so we can do cleanup on the other course after the open course gets setup for the day. As always, feel free to email me with any questions.

#16 Devlin around 2pm today….This hole was cleaned up completely yesterday

Recovering nicely

The Devlin greens, tees and fairways are all healing nicely from aeration last week. The greens were cored with a 3/8" core on 2" spacing on a quad block. We then put out around 35 tons of sand to work into the holes and the canopy. On tees we used a 5/8" coring time and on fairways we used our new Aerway slicer. 

#18 Weiskopf cart path repair

With all the rain we had in June and early July we had some erosion issues of the ravine in #18 which then extended to the cart path. Precision Golf Construction came in and did a great job akin these areas safe again.  They are a local company out of Chardon that have done some small projects for us and we are very happy with their work.  Here are some pictures.

Cart path and drain before

Starting to dig out old drain

Using pavers instead of concrete so when it settles, we can fix

More rip rap will be added to outfall area to prevent erosion

While Precision Golf was here, they also fixed #9 and #15  wash out as well