Aerification update, weevil control and seeding short rough.

As most of you know by now, we aerified greens and tees the week after labor day. Ideally, we would have also completed fairway aerification but, we were unable to because it rained every day that week. The greens are healing in very nicely and should be back to normal shortly. We've mowed them a few times since aerifying and are starting to lower the height of cut back to what we normally maintain them at. The reason we raise the height of cut after aerifying is to keep the mowers from picking up too much sand, which damages the mowers.  We will try again to aerify fairways next Tuesday and Wednesday. Hopefully the weather co-operates and we can complete them because they badly need to be aerified.

Sept 15.

Sept 20.




















Something we've been waiting to do is a late season application to control the annual bluegrass weevils that are in our fairways. With this application we want to reduce the number of adults overwintering on the course which will in turn reduce the adults we have reproducing in the spring. The weevils have been munching away on the bluegrass in the fairways for a few weeks now but, we've been keeping an eye on them to make sure it didn't get out of hand. The reason why we let them go is because they're killing annual bluegrass, which we're trying to reduce anyway. Spraying weevils doesn't require covering the entire fairway. A majority of weevils are in the first few feet off of the short rough, so we sprayed one lap around each fairway and were able to get a majority of the weevils without using much product at all. Hopefully, we'll see a reduced population next year.


Deceased weevils (the small white things).



















Finally, we started seeding into some areas on the course to re-establish stands of grass that suffered this summer. We began in the short rough, on bunker banks and in the rough around greens. Getting seed started right now in these thin areas will reduce weed invasion and improve the stand for next year, resulting in healthier grass and greater play-ability. We'll continue to do this all fall in order to rebuild our stands of turf.

Seeded short rough. Looks ugly, but it will be better for this.

Ian