Projects continue but the weather is changing

 

Are you waiting patiently for Spring to show up? Boomer and his black coat would rather winter stay here all year long. We have a ways to go for soil temps and daylight period to reach bermuda wakening levels but after Saturday there are not many frost events left in sight.

Our average germination date for crabgrass here in Charlotte is late February. This week we began applying a pre and a post emergent herbicide to continue battling Poa annua and to make sure we are covered for crabgrass germination. This application covers close to 200 acres of bermudagrass across the property. The GPS tracking technology on the sprayers ensures nothing is missed or doubled up.

Our irrigation technicians James and Connor have been working around the clubhouse this winter upgrading and checking on the multitude of zones in the landscape. This zone for example always had been run on a manually controller timer. It is now wired up to a new controller that can be run remotely, giving much more flexibility in run times and adjustments according to the weather.

Edgar and Elliot are closing in on having all the heads around the North greens leveled with only a few heads on 11 green left to raise. These two stalwarts celebrate their 18th and 20th anniversaries here at Carmel this month.

The South opened up a pretty hefty drainage project this week on 9 fairway. The new trencher attachment was in action and did a pretty good job of heaving soil straight into the trailer as opposed to having the guys hand shovel everything up.

The 500 feet of new drainage in this high traffic area on 9 welcomed our new Assistant Superintendent on the South Matt Danen, here on the right. Matt is a military veteran and worked with me at Cattail Creek and was most recently at Rolling Road in Baltimore. Matt brings an impressive work ethic and a broad knowledge of turfgrass and the game of golf to round out the management team on the South.

The guys had everything buttoned up with pipe, gravel and sand by close of business on Wednesday.

We picked off a few more trees left of 9 North early in the week. As the sun wraps around to the west these cart entries and exits should be getting a significant boost in sunlight as the growing season progresses. The stump grinder has been working hard and we hope to have a few of these areas left of 9 graded with new soil and some sod next week.

The 50 foot lift is still out and about working to prune trees up and cut any dead or dangerous limbs out where necessary. We have been trading out with the clubhouse grounds team and it does seem that this job is never ending. This is great winter work that is helping provide a much cleaner look around the campus.

Despite the snow we are still almost 8" behind in moisture this year. It looks like that number will decrease by about an inch over the weekend. Next week looks like another hint at spring!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to Carmel's Agronomy Blog!

Image
  Greetings all and welcome to the first post of Carmel's Agronomy blog. This page will be updated most Thursday afternoons by myself (Chris Harriman, Director of Agronomy) or by South Course Superintendent Micah Pennybaker or North Course Superintendent Eric Downs. My first order of business here is to thank both Micah and Eric for getting this property through one of the toughest summers on record. Our goal of enhancing the golf experience at Carmel by promoting healthy and consistent conditions is set and we are off and running. Although this is our first post for Carmel, this is about the 900th blog post of my career. Each of those 900 posts were from golf courses with bentgrass greens. Diving into the consistency and conditions of the South Course greens is not just a priority it is a passion! So far, we have modified greens mower setups including changing out rollers and lowering heights while increasing additional rolling frequency. The water has been turned down, Subairs tu...
Read more

South greens aeration complete

Image
  This past Monday for aeration week did not start out exactly how we would of liked. Another nationwide long severe thunderstorm rolled through with some serious wind and frigid air behind it. Thankfully less than an inch of rain was observed and not much of it was in the form of hail although we could make out some tiny indentations on the North greens from what may of been a quick hail storm at some point. One huge oak uprooted right of 11 South and it did some damage to other surrounding oaks as well. In addition to aeration we were also tasked with cleaning up this area. The North team came over to help out and the main positive is that much more sunlight will be coming through in the afternoon to help keep 11 approach a little drier. While our kids sat home from school on Monday we ran out and got started with aeration. 6 greens were cored with 3/8" tines and blown off before the storms rolled through.  The SavATree guys were the only ones that braved the afternoon rain ...
Read more

Beautiful weather for golf!

Image
  80 degrees and low humidity is ideal for golf but we sure could use a little rain for the turf out there. A big focus over the past few weeks has been identifying irrigation issues and making sure the zoysia on the south stays healthy going into dormancy. This head for example on 18, was stuck in the same position and needed to be replaced. A stuck head quickly leads to a section of the approach area to be wet and then the rest of the turf it was responsible for watering to be dry. In addition to the water quality issues we discussed last week, we are working to come up with a plan to solve how to best deliver water to the turf all across the property. The cooler nights allowed us to put the verticutter out on the bentgrass greens this week. The vertical blades were set to just tickle the top of the turf, slicing any longer leaf blades and helping tighten up the bent. A light dusting of sand topdressing followed the verticutter.  The more aggressive greens groomer brush fol...
Read more