Greens and cold

The greens are a little furry today. You have to be careful this time of year with mowing and maintenance. The freeze / thaw process will make the greens real soft and the mowers can actually make the greens more bumpy. The thawing process results in a extremely soft top and a still frozen bottom layer.

We will try to get the greens mown tomorrow. Hopefully we won't have a long frost Saturday morning and we can get the greens cleaned up. Today we are waiting for the frost to lift so we can get out there and get them blown off. It's 26 degrees at 7am....it might be a while. The guys are helping with Christmas decorations today at the club until we can get on the greens.

It's always a fluid process in deciding weather to wait for maintenance tasks on the greens on a morning like this, or just go ahead and send the guys home and save on labor. A lot of times I'll look at the tee sheet and if it's fairly dead, I'll try to save on the labor (on weekends). If it looks like we can get some stuff done without waiting all day and we are going to have some play, we try to do everything we can.

Brent Graham, CGCS
Director of Golf Maintenance
Two Rivers Country Club
1950 Two Rivers Rd.
Williamsburg, VA 23185
Cell: 757-592-0840
Office: 757-258-4606
Bgraham@tworiversclub.com
Governorsland.com

Bunkers

Thursday we were working on tweaking the sand depths in 6 greenside bunker. I was pretty happy with the end results but we still have a little more to do in this bunker.

This task took 3 guys about 3.5 hrs, and this is one of the smallest bunkers on the course. It's gonna take some serious time to work through most of these bunkers.

He's back....

That fox came back again last night and dug up 13 green again. I brought someone in to see if we can get him caught and relocated to Charles City.

Greens

The greens were a little slower and softer than they
have been lately. I flushed them yesterday. We are still having elevated sodium levels in the greens from the lack of rain this fall.

The sodium acts as a growth regulator this time of year. Flushing the greens to remove a good portion of sodium helps the greens to continue growing and maturing. We were getting less than a half bucket of grass off the greens the last week, after the flush we got about 2 buckets off each green. This is a good example of how the greens feel and look much better after a flush or heavy rain.

The pond on 4 is getting pretty low. I'm trying to avoid putting more bad water in the pond that will hang around for some time. Let's hope for some rain soon to refill that thing.

Fox

A fox got into 13 green last night and dug a hole in that spot we have been working on back left. He was probably after that organic material that we put in the mixture that we filled the holes with. Looks like we need to do a better job on our "wildlife management".

Hopefully the nursery will be ready in the next couple weeks to be able to give us a few plugs to repair this area. The nursery is coming in good, even with the late seeding. We didn't rebuild it until after member guest. The nursery is used to repair spots like this, but we mainly use it for a testing area. It's great to be able to test different chemicals on this nursery before we put it out on all the greens. We can see how that grass responds to different rates and evaluate different products to make sure they are effective enough out down on all the rest of the greens. This saves us money over the course if the year. If we try something new, we can spray the nursery first and if the product works, I can put it down on all the greens...if it doesn't work...we are just out 2500 sqft of product versus 140,000 sqft.

Carts on grass

Tomorrow will be the last day for carts on the grass for the winter. The Bermuda rough is almost completely dormant and the fariways are getting closer. The reason that we make it cart path only for the winter is to avoid beating down the grass when it's not growing. This will pay dividends in the spring when everything starts greening up. - it's one of the reasons that our Bermuda is so good in the spring and early summer. It stinks this time of year when the weather is still nice, but it's something that needs to be done in order to have great conditions next year.

Brent Graham, CGCS
Director of Golf Maintenance
Two Rivers Country Club
1950 Two Rivers Rd.
Williamsburg, VA 23185
Cell: 757-592-0840
Office: 757-258-4606
Bgraham@tworiversclub.com
Governorsland.com

Frost

We are now in the time of year for frost delays. We are waiting for the frost to lift so we can get out and blow off all the greens. We don't have enough time to mow all the greens in front of play with these frost delays. Since the rest of the week looks good we should be able to mow greens tomorrow morning.

The rest of the amigos left this morning. We are down to the nitty gritty with staff. I already can't wait for the guys to come back!

Tree removal

We are still working on tree removal around 13 green. The more sunlight we can get to that green the healthier it will be.

Greens

The thin areas on 13 have come a long way in the last couple days. We did a manual drill and fill on that one spot on the back left. It is very tedious but should work good. We pull out the plugs with a soil probe on a template with holes then use a funnel to fill the holes with a mixture of sand, organic material, calcium, magnesium, and potassium.

Curbs and Rough

Here are some pics of the work going on along the cart path on #2.  We are removing the curb and re-leveling the ground.  The curbing that is around the course breaks easily, limits cart path width and allows us to easily maintain these edges.  The first pic was taken after we removed all the concrete and the second was taken after the sod was removed and the ground was graded.  The final step is to replace the sod along the path.

As you can see the rough is starting to go dormant.  We call this look "Tiger Stripes" - this happens after the first few frosts when the grass is making its way towards dormancy.  We should have the carts off the paths for at least the next couple weeks until the rough starts to show some wear from cart traffic.  It's done growing for the year so it cant recover from the traffic that the carts put on it.  This wear in most cases won't kill the plant - although it could if the traffic was concentrated enough - but it will severely impede spring greenup and result in an unhealthy plant.