Rainy Saturday

So far today we are at 2.95 inches of rain, bringing our year-to-date to 31 inches.

Greens aerification

We aerified all the greens today and started the cleanup process.  We will finish cleaning, rolling and topdressing tomorrow.

Verticutting fairways

These pictures are of the fairway vericutting we performed in June.  It is a 3 step process.
Step1: verticut the fairway 2 directions to affect the grain growing in different directions.  The grain of the grass generally goes downhill which on one fairway may actually be multiple different directions depending on where the slope faces.
Step 2: mow the fairways to cut off the grass that was stood up by the verticutter
Step 3: blow the debri off the fairway and they are ready for play

Fairway verticutter (look at all that material)
The material you see flying out of the reels is thatch.  This needs to be thinned out to maintain firm fairways and healthy plant growth.

This view is of the verticut fairway next to the unverticut fairway.  

Aerification August 5th and 6th

Golf Course Maintenance

We are aerifying the greens on Monday and Tuesday.  This aerification will mimic the one we did in June.  Greens aerification is extrememly important for the overall health of the greens.  The turf on greens is under and extreme amount of stress.  Aerification allows for improved air and water movement withing the soil profile which makes for healthier roots which in turn makes for a healthier plant allowing it to better handle the daily stress we put on them.  Mowing grass at less than 1/8 inch as we do daily inherently causes stress, but once you add foot traffic, disease pressure, shade(which bermuda hates) insect pressure and our hot humid Texas summers into the mix, it makes for a stressed out plant that is using all the energy is has just to survive.  We are also going to verticut the fairways as we did in June.  Verticutting the fairways will help make a tighter lie and make the fairways less prone to scalping this time of year.

Afternoon Thunderstorms

Friday afternoon about 12:30 we received a couple inches of heavy rain in a short amount of time resulting in washed out bunkers that are full or water.  On top of the 3 inches we had earlier in the week our total for the week is now in the 4-5 inch range.  We are thankful for the rain though we are behind on mowing so when we are able to get the mowers out next week there is going to be a lot of grass.  Fairways 5 and 10 look odd because we were halfway through mowing them when it started raining and could not finish.  As always we will get everything back into shape as quickly as we can.

Much needed rain

The thunderstorms last night gave us a nice 8/10ths of an inch of rain.  Fortunately it came slow enough that course damage and cleanup is minimal.  We are able to maintain regular 90degree cart rules today.

Rain

I was on #5 green when the rain line hit this morning at 7:45AM.  The wind picked up and it cooled off by 10 degrees instantly.  We recieved .85inches of rain in about 45 minutes.  CART PATH ONLY all day.