Moss and poa death.

In anticipation of aerifying greens this week, we started spraying the moss on greens in order to limit its spread across the putting surfaces. Moss has proven itself to be one of our bigger management problems. We had been beating it back slowly and consistently by spraying in the spring and fall over the past year but, once we had the two weeks of rain in early August it came back strong. The problem with trying to spray for moss during the summer is that the product we use can be hard on greens that are stressed from the heat. So the moss that survived the spring was able to thrive once it had the proper conditions earlier last month. In reaction to this, we started our moss control program a few weeks early this year. Doing this will give us more time to control the population before the end of the year and will limit the mechanical spread of moss during aerification. You'll notice that the moss on greens has turned brown and will stay that way as we continue our control efforts.

Of Moss and Men from USGA

As I've discussed earlier on this blog, we've been working to reduce the amount of annual bluegrass in the fairways this year. We've been pretty successful so far and actually received a bit of help from the rain. The fairway spots that laid wet for a few days after all the recent rain actually killed off all the annual bluegrass and left behind the bent. Now, these spots do look terrible, but if you look at what's left it is all bentgrass which, after we aerify, top-dress and seed into these areas, should fill in leave us with a nice stand of bent. It's not the ideal way to transition from annual bluegrass to bent but we'll make it work.

Thin spot with only bentgrass remaining.

This week is our aerification week. It looks like we should be able to get greens done and hopefully a few fairways. Ideally, we'd get all the greens and fairways done, but it looks like we'll be getting some rain at the end of the week which would keep us from finishing. If unable to finish aerifying fairways, we'll have to finish them whenever possible later in the fall. It's not ideal but we've done it before. I hope you all enjoy your labor day weekend and we'll see you when we re-open later this week.

Ian