Greens

The greens are loaded with sodium right now. The plant just does not operate correctly under these conditions. Hopefully this natural rainfall will build up and we will get some fresh, sodium free water in the greens. The salt is one of the reasons they are slow in some areas to recover from the aeration and a little puffy and slow.

I'm ready to get on with this fall - the greens are going to be sweet as soon as they recover from the big aeration and topdressing. Now I just need the weather to cooperate. This heat and humidity can go away.

I'm excited to see the current condition of the edges that we thought we would really struggle with this summer. They are in really good shape and will finally have the opportunity to mature. This will give them a head start going into what should be a really good year, next year. The greens are starting to mature and can start to handle more stress.

I was really careful with them this year, trying to take it easy on them their first full year of play. You wouldn't even believe me if I told you how much money, time and effort we put into these edges this year. It's nice to see the effort pay off. We could have done all of this and more to the old greens and they would have been really, really unhappy and sick right now with this amount of sodium and some late summer heat and humidity. It's easy to forget what the old ones were like (no one wants to forget more than me) but there is a huge difference between these greens and the old ones. Our greens speed never consistently fell below 8.5-9' all summer....even with the conservative management because of the relative immaturity. It wasn't uncommon for the old greens to roll less than 8' for extended periods of time in the summer.

The two pictures below are areas on 5 & 8 that had very little grass on them this time last year. It's great to see progression.