Archive for July, 2010

As I have mentioned previously we are having some troubles with our new practice putting green.  The old practice greens that were virtually in the same location were almost 100% annual bluegrass putting surfaces.  With the excessive morning shade on that surface it is the best grass suited to that environment.  When we rebuilt the green we sodded it with a creeping bentgrass that had some annual bluegrass contamination in it.  The creeping bentgrass is struggling to survive with the shaded morning conditions and the heavy traffic.  The green was mostly holding it’s own until this past weekend.  After a couple of days of heavy rain on Friday and Saturday and heavy play from the Alumni-Guest tournament the turf has thinned out even more.  This has caused me to take action to protect any further damage.  We will be closing that green on regular play days and just opening it up for tournament play until we are able to get the turf to recover from this past weekends wear.  We will also be skipping some mowings and likely raising the mowing height a bit on that green.  Ultimately as I have said in the past if we don’t get more morning sunlight on that green we will go through this type of thinning most every year until we get to the point where we have a large enough population of annual bluegrass that can tolerate the lack of morning sunlight to prevent this from happening.

With over 5 inches of rain in the past 2 weeks the drought is officially over!  We are venting greens today with solid needle tines (about 1/4″ diameter and about 3-4″ deep) to allow for some air exchange in our soils which have been saturated for a good part of the past 2 weeks.  This is the same process that we did after the Men’s 3-day Member Guest in the end of June.  The greens might be a little bumpy for a couple of days but very playable.  We are also aerating the collars with 1/4′” hollow core tines to reduce the compaction, improve water and air exchange as well as reduce thatch accumulation.  Both of these practices should be relatively non-disruptive to play today with the exception of some of the very early groups teeing of between 11 AM-12 PM.  The golf course is holding up very well despite the less than favorable growing conditions.  It looks like we are in for a stretch of less humid, less rainy weather so come enjoy the golf course!

The heat rolls on!  This July has to be one of the hottest in recorded history, I don’t think we have had more than one day where the temperature dropped below 80 degrees or one night where the temperature dropped below 60 degrees.  Thunderstorm activity starting on July 10th has dumped over 3 inches of rain at Taconic in the past 10 days alleviating the drought situation for the time being.  The most recent storm on July 17 made a mess of the course.  I believe this is the fourth such event like that this season.  It’s almost like spring clean-up 5 times in one season!  We still have another day or so to finish cleaning up all of the branches and debris from that storm, and this is after the removal of some 2.000+ trees over the last 10 years!

Severe thunderstorms moved through the area last night dumping heavy rains and packing strong winds.  Luckily with all of the drainage work we did with the Master Plan the course drained terrific and we are able to open for play with carts this Sunday morning.  Unfortunately the golf course is a mess.  All available man power is being used to just clean as much as possible this morning to make the course playable, no mowing of greens or raking of bunkers will happen and there will still be a couple of full days of clean-up for Monday and Tuesday of next week.

We survived round one!  Record setting heat along with a 15 day drought put quite a bit of stress on the golf course and the grounds staff, but Saturdays reprieve was just what the doctor ordered.  Our irrigation pond isfilled back up, our recharge well is taking a break and we have been able to take our hands off of the watering hoses for at least a brief break.  Over all I am pleased with the way the course is holding up, but realize that the stress of summer is far from over with another week forecast to be well above average temperatures.  The dry conditions have actually been beneficial in keeping fungal pathogens at controllable levels.  With each bout of extreme environmental conditions we just work on controlling the damage and amount of turf loss so that when we get more normal conditions the golf course bounces right back into our usual form.  So far so good!