Course Conditions

The sun came out over the weekend but the humidity has also come back leaving the greens soft thus causing our mowers to continue to scalp. On greens 3,6, and 9 this is most evident because they are comprised mostly of the newer bentgrass variety a-4 which is a great fine leaf bentgrass that most new courses use on the greens, only down-side is that it produces alot of thatch. I topdressed the greens again yesterday which will make them messy for the next couple of days but it is very important that we get as much sand into the canopy of the turf to prevent this scalping. I received many questions about why the greens were slow this weekend for the President/Vice-President tournament and the simple reason is that it rained for four days and we didn't see the sun for 5 days last week. When the greens are soft they are going to be slower, we mowed and rolled the greens both Saturday and Sunday to gain as much roll as we could. The 8th green is still struggling from the winter damage on the left side of the green. The winter damage was cause by ice formation from the freeze thaw cycle that we receive in that low lying area of the course, as the water drained toward the left side of the green it would freeze again causing ice, suffocating the plant. This damage was not caused by sleigh riders on the course during the winter. I was trying to establish seed in the damaged areas but that just didn't work with the weather we have had so I have turned to installing sod plugs from our nursery green. We have installed over 225 plugs now but still have a ways to go. I am topdressing the green twice a week to help smooth the area that we are plugging. The cool wet weather has also caused the rough to grow very fast the few days so I will have an operator on the rough mower 8 hours a day until we are caught up.