Archive for August, 2010

We were fortunate to be able to get aeration done on greens last week with intervals of showers.  Now just 4 days after aeration we are into another mini heat wave as the temperature reached the upper 80’s on Sunday and is expected to be even hotter through Wednesday of this week.  We are making sure we don’t do anything to stress the greens anymore during this period.  Giving them ample water, reasonable mowing heights, etc. and not being concerned about ball roll right now is the priority.  By the end of this week the weather is forecast to cool off and then we can resume normal maintenance practices focusing on ball roll.

We managed to get the greens aerated this week between the rain drops.  All the greens were verti-cut, aerated with 1/4″ hollow tines to a 2″ depth at 1.5″ spacing, the cores were cleaned of , the greens were rolled, topdressed, dimple seeded, brushed, fertilized and watered.  This requires all of our man power to accomplish (we could have actually used a little more) and in the process the rest of the course gets temporarily neglected.  It should take a few days to get everything cleaned up and looking good.  I expect that in a weeks time the greens will be playing real good again and withing about 2 weeks or so they should be completely healed and better than they were before we aerated.  We still have to do approaches, tees and fairways which we will be doing around play.  We try to minimize the impact on play when we aerate these other areas but early morning tee times will probably be inconvenienced.

The weather did not cooperate today to aerate greens.  Tomorrow is another day and we will see what that brings.  With the forecast weather for Tues. and Wed. not looking real good, there is a chance that aeration will be put off until next Mon., Tues. August 30 and 31.  We will continue to aerate tees and approaches as weather and time permits for the rest of  this week.  The plan for this aeration is the same as this spring.  Verti-cutting, aerating with small tines, heavy topdressing and dimple seeding.  When the weather cooperates it should go smoothly and be fairly non-disruptive to play and heal in quickly.  I will update the home page Tues. and Wed. morning to let the members know if we are aerating greens those days.

The greens at Taconic will be aerated next week, this is of course still weather dependant but the forecast at this time looks to be seasonable temperatures.  We will again be using small tines along with vertical mowing, dimple seeding and topdressing much like we did in May.  This week we will be aerating tees and testing our green tines on the chipping green and nursery.  As in the past once we finish with greens aeration we will begin on collars, approaches, fairways and finishing up any tees not done this week.  Our goal is to have everything done by the time the greens completely fill in from aeration so there are no more disruptions to the fall golf season.

Above average temperatures and sticky air continue to be the dominant weather trends at Taconic Golf Club.  We have been fortunate enough to get a couple of breaks in the heat and humidity as well as some timely rainfall, however the weather continues to be challenging for turf management this summer.  Our practice putting green which started to take a slide shortly after the Alumni/Guest tournament has rebounded quite nicely.  This immature green is susceptible to severe damage during wet conditions and I will have to be more protective of that for now.  The rest of the golf course is still going strong.  The couple of greens that have some thin spots on them seem to have started to rebound a bit and start filling back in.  While we have had tremendous disease pressure, a shortened spray frequency has kept most of the fungal pathogens at bay on our fine turf areas.  And with the timely rainfall most of the golf course has managed to stay green with some supplemental hand watering from the grounds staff.  Labor Day is typically the end of the high stress period for turf grass management in the northeast which for many of us can’t come soon enough!