Winter work

Winter came early and so we have been forced to stop working on fall projects and start with winter work. This week we started on our tree removal, which is focused only on dead or dying trees that are not only an eye sore, but also a safety hazard. The trees are primarily ash that have been killed by the Emerald Ash Borer. There are about 100 trees we are hoping to remove this winter, which shouldn't be an issue as most of the trees are fairly small and out of the way.

Something else we address in the fall is the course equipment. Over the season things like tee markers, ball washers and benches get abused, so we try to clean things up in the winter when we can't get out on the course because of heavy snow or extreme cold. The tee markers were sanded this week and we will repaint them so they look as good as new next spring. It can get a little messy, as you see below.

Things have already slowed down for us and will continue to as winter tightens its grip, so I'm going to be posting less frequently. My weekly posts would just be to tell you that we removed more trees, plowed more snow and did more winter maintenance; so I'll just post if something interesting happens. You may have noticed that I added a link to Hyde Park Golf and Country Club's maintenance blog. Hyde Park is a Donald Ross course in the Cincinnati area. I interned there in 2007 and learned a lot because, as you'll see if you look at the blog, they do a lot of course improving projects. Pat O'Brien is the superintendent there and his blog was what gave me the idea to do this blog. So take a look, they do a lot of cool things and have a lot of different challenges (Zoysia grass fairways for example) than we do.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ian

Great weather

The first three days of this week gave us some great weather, allowing us to get a lot of work done. The bunker on #2 had been sodded, a snow mold application was put on fairways and greens, a few more fairways were top-dressed and we started slit seeding the fairways with an aggressive verti-cutter. When the weather turned cold today we blew out the irrigation at the swim/tennis club and winterized the bathrooms on the course. Tomorrow we will start blowing out the irrigation system on the golf course, unless of course we are plowing snow! 

#2 bunker

Vertical mower. We used this machine last year and had some great results. 

Slits up close. 

Ian 

#2 bunker

This week we started working on #2 bunker. The sod and sand is all peeled off and we put new drainage in the bunker bottom. We also re-graded the rough in front of the bunker so that surface water will run in front of instead of into the bunker. The bunker itself will not be changing, we are simply re-doing the drainage and moving the bunker faces back down to where they originally were. I've attached some pictures below.

This is the bunker with everything pulled out. You can see that the valley in front of the bunker is more prominent. It looks drastic right now, but once we add topsoil and sod to the rough area it will soften.

A view looking at the green.

Ian