14 green soaking up some sun

The week began with less than perfect weather for greens aeration. It began raining Sunday evening, and did not stop until around 10 am on Monday. The rain gauge had registered just over an inch of rain between Sunday evening and 6 am when we were scheduled to start aerating greens on the back nine. It was clearly too wet to complete greens aeration the way we would typically go about it. We modified the process a bit in order to get the aeration accomplished. Rather than use core harvesters, which makes the process much more efficient, we used a core hog. Think of a core hog as a snow plow that is attached to the front of a walk behind greens mower. Luckily, we purchased a core hog a few year ago in order to clear aeration cores off the clubhouse practice green, which is located in an area that is too tight to use core harvesters.

Core Hog mounted to a Toro 1000 Mower

Using a core hog to push cores off the green eliminates the need to drive core harvesters across the greens. It was important to keep the heavy equipment off the saturated greens in order to prevent rutting from occurring. Unfortunately, using the core hog requires about 3 extra people, and significantly more manual labor in order to keep up with the aerator. This worked out alright, because it was too wet to top dress and brush the greens anyway. I was really happy with the way we were able to deal with the huge weather curve ball on Monday. The agronomy staff did a nice job making lemonade with the lemons the weather had provided.

On Tuesday, the weather was just fine, and we were able to use the core harvesters on the front nine greens without any problems. We also rolled, top dressed, brushed in the sand, and cut new cups on all holes ahead of play (barely). As I was walking off the last green after cutting the cup, the first group of golfers was just arriving to hit shots into the green.

I made a short video of our aeration process. I failed to get a video while I was brushing the greens, so I included a picture of the brush from earlier this year. A huge THANK YOU goes out to the agronomy staff for getting the aeration done despite the awful weather we experienced on Monday.

I was happy to see some of you using our preferred divot pattern on the driving range tee. I appreciate those who are making an effort to help us keep the driving range tee in the best condition possible. If you have not tried practicing using our preferred divot pattern, please try it out on your next trip to the driving range.

Thank you to those that are practicing with the divot pattern in the picture.  I really appreciate  your effort.