Monday, July 4th, 2011

Happy Independence Day to everyone!
What a fantastic morning to be working on the golf course. Golfers were teeing it up at 5:04am and the course was looking fantastic. We are finally seeing some modeling on the fairways and a few of the greens are showing a bit of stress as well. All is good though, we are drying it down to that level intentionally to get a feel for where our limits are. This is the point in which we run a long soak cycle on the greens to completely wet the profile. We will reduce the water cycles for a while, allowing them dry them down once again. This is the cycle that will encourage our roots to remain deep throughout the season.

We utilize many tools to enable us to get the moisture through the profile and one of those is the wetting agent Revolution. This aids the water in penetrating through the profile without keeping the soil too wet. We also use solid tine aerification to increase the oxygen exchange in the root zone as well as alleviate any surface problems. As a matter of fact we are planning on using the bayonet tines beginning tomorrow on the back nine and then we'll plan on reversing the nines and doing the front on Wednesday.  The bayonets are small knife-like tines that will penetrate the surface to about four inches. We roll immediately following the procedure so there is no significant change in ball roll.

This week we will be fertilizing the rough and the fairways with a granular 36-0-6 for the first and only time of the year. This may be our last granular application to the fairways for some time in that we are beginning our Redox program on the fairways starting in September. We will use very little nitrogen, using only enough to give us the needed repair. If it works on the fairways as good as it is working on the tees, then we are in for some pretty nice conditions.

Looking down the calendar, we are accumulated quite a few shotgun tournaments. It is so nice to see the calendar finally filling up. We are looking forward to providing them all with the finest conditions possible.