Course Update

April 19, 2021

The golf course has been progressing well over the last few weeks despite the weather. The best way to describe it is the turf has been playing red light green light. The warm weeks we have had, have started the process of the course greening up and recovering from last year’s damage but the cold weeks that have followed push pause on that process. Regardless, the greens are almost completely healed from aerification, and most of the damage from last year is healed as well, with the exception of 16 and 5 greens.
The process of recovering from that much damage is always slow and painful.

You may have noticed that there are two colors of turf on the greens right now, a light green almost white looking turf and a darker green turf. The light green is Poa Annua, it has a white coloration right now because of a product we applied 2 weeks ago to control the seed heads. We have a second app planned this week which will help with ball roll and the smoothness of the greens. The darker green is Bentgrass which is the desired variety. Many of the greens look like they have dark green spots on them, which is the Bentgrass seed that we put down with aerification. Our goal this year is to favor the Bentgrass in hopes to create competition for the Poa so we can eventually begin to control the Poa.

Now that the greens are mostly healed, we can begin focusing on grooming them and reaching our target ball speeds and roll. Our plans include frequent light topdressing, grooming, increased mowing and rolling and providing a balanced nutrient program for them. We’ve been cautious with the greens up to this point to make sure they fully recovered but with the weather over the next two weeks on our side we can be a little more aggressive with them.

Over the last month GCM also overseeded all the fairways with 777 Bentgrass and the rough with an improved variety of Tall Fescue. The seeding will be a big improvement to course conditions this season, and future years. We have been focusing on getting as much seed down as we can in this last month, so we can apply a pre-emergent herbicide next month. Once the pre-emergent is applied it will prevent both weed and turf seed from germinating.

We’ve been very busy preparing for the upcoming season, now that most of our prep work is completed we can focus on detailing the course and grooming the property. We appreciate your continued support in our efforts of recovering the greens and fairways.

Peter Danaher, Golf Course Superintendent