Another Aerification Article

Yep, We aerified the greens again.  I was trying to think of a different way to communicate this topic because I'm sure that I've beaten it like a drum in past posts. 
My staff and I have aerified, cleaned off cores, picked up cores, sanded, fertilized twice, brushed, and watered all day long.  This was my 13th time aerifying the greens here at IHGC.  The 27th time for my career.  Over that time period it gets pretty difficult to change your methods.  However, I did change some of the chemical and fertilizer methods that I used to hold true to.  I won't bore you with the details, but the generalities are, something to make the greens more firm and more fertilizers of different varieties. 
Normally on Aerification day we are still plugging away (literally) at the greens until 5:30 or 6:00 PM and wouldn't finish topdressing and dragging until noon on day 2.  But, my staff was clocking out at 4 PM because everything had gone so smoothly.  Still not exactly sure where the reduction in time came from but I like it. 
I will be posting a video of the process on my youtube channel before too long so that you can better see the whole process in action. 
We punched 4.6 million holes in the greens.  That's just shy of 250,000 holes per green on average.

Stump Removal

As you know from Playing the course or my previous posts on the blog we have removed a substantial amount of trees from the golf course for various reasons.  I'm not going back into the reasoning for removing the trees that was a different post.  The last part of the job was removing the stumps that were left behind.  The options were to dig them out with a loader and then fill in a large coarse hole on the course, or have someone come in and grind them up for us and leave a nice little compact hole to repair.  We removed about 35 stumps yesterday and got them all covered back up today. 

Link to the grinding process video

We used a company by the name of Stump Pro out of Jackson, TN.  The owner Shawn Westacott is the golf course superintendent at Jackson Country Club.  He did a great job.  The only problem was that I forgot 1 stump on #9 that was covered by a pile of wood.  So, we missed one. 

Roundup Application

Some of you may have noticed the blue/green dye around the greens and in the club grounds.  This is a dye indicator that shows where our chemical application was made with the spray hawk bordering the greens.  We used the dye this year to try to make us more efficient this winter.  When we spray with the standard spray rigs we use foam marker to show where we have gone.  20 min later the foam is gone and no one knows that we were ever there.  The Spray Hawk device does not have a foam marker there fore we cannot see where we sprayed chemical very well.  We added the dye this year to reduce overlapping of chemical and missed areas in between passes.  I think that it really made the operation much more smooth.  The operators doing the spraying loved it.  I am still not loving the color left behind but I am a fan of the process being more efficient.

Coincidentally,  If you do have a yard that is Bermudagrass or are looking to start the process of cleaning up the weeds in your yard now is the time to make that roundup application.  You have through February to finish this task.