A great example of Frost Damage!

Take a close look at the grass in this picture.  No doubt one of the first things you will see is the tire tracks from a truck who must have cut the corner when leaving the Club.  Next to the tire tracks, those are foot prints from someone obviously walking across the grass.  This is a great example of frost damage on turfgrass!  The reason the tire tracks and footprints are visible and a yellowish color on the grass is because when the temperatures were 25 degrees last Wednesday morning and frosted, these people chose to walk and drive across the grass.  The grass had started to green up after a record warm February, and then when we had a hard freeze on March 15th, this grass became very vulnerable to damage!

This grass should recover fine over time, but there is always a chance of it being damaged further.  This is one of the main reasons we have frost delays on the golf course throughout the winter months.  The warm season grasses such as zoysia and bermuda are very fragile in the spring time when coming out of dormancy.  The abnormally warm weather has made the grass wake up earlier than normal, and therefore it is very important we are careful to not damage the turf with golf cart wear or even foot prints.  

This picture is a great example of what can happen when it is below 32 degrees to the grass if it is even walked on! 

Project Completion on #14!

Here is the area on #14 before we started to remove the trees.  The carts on the right hand side are on the fairway/rough line.  These trees were very much in play and were hard to deal with if you were to hit your second or third shot short right of #14 green.

Here is the same view after all the trees were removed, stumps ground up, and now we have installed new sod on the entire area.  No doubt this is now a clear shot to the green, but also a much more playable area with grass instead of tree roots and dirt.

Here is another picture a little farther back from the previous two pictures.  This shows another large area we sodded also during this project on #14.  If you can remember there was an old hickory tree that was not doing very well in this area, and under the tree stump was a lot of bare dirt and rocks.  We decided to remove the tree and replace it with sod to help improve this area.  I think that it will be very much an improvement to the play-ability of this golf hole in the future!

Greens Aerification

It is that time of year again, the Spring Greens Aerification!  This week we took the opportunity to punch and sand the greens, and the entire process went very smoothly.  We do this for many different reasons, but the main goal is to grow great roots!  The Spring season is the time the creeping bentgrass roots grow the best, so by punching the holes into the greens it allows air and water to easily get below the greens surface.  The temperatures between March and May are generally optimal for root growth, and we will need these roots to be strong and healthy to survive the hot Georgia summer heat.  We also add amendments and fertilizers to the soil at this time to try and maintain a healthy soil in which the grass grows.   Take a look at the pictures below to see different steps of the process!

The Greens will be fully recovered by April 1st!