Golf Course Maintenance Newsletter
Donny Latham - Director of Agronomy
Happy May to everyone. I'm happy to be putting April behind us. It was an extremely busy month as we simultaneously ramped up our seasonal mowing operations and continued repairing freeze damaged areas around each of the courses. I want to thank everyone for your patience while we re-sodded Miller #5 fairway and tee box. This will be open for play sometime this month, but we will still restrict cart traffic as the sod continues to take root. We laid 77 pallets (3.5 semi-truck loads) of Zeon Zoysia sod. This type of grass is arguably the best playing surface for tees and fairways. It's also a very shade tolerant turf grass that will do well with the large pines that shadow Miller #5 for a majority of the day. You may have also noticed that we sodded the bottleneck a little wider than the previous turf line. The narrow fairway will still be one of the tougher tee shots on this fantastic golf course, but we have added more grass to the left and right sides. I hope to maintain this grass as rough, so that if your tee shot does go off the center line you will no longer be in pine straw or hard pan. I believe this will make the hole much more playable. I'm very excited to see how this hole turns out.
Here's another fun agronomy fact as we close out the month of April... we applied 65,000 lbs. of fertilizer across all three courses. This has certainly helped our turf wake up from the hard winter that we experienced and I'm happy to once again be cutting fairways three times a week, as well as the tees, collars, and approaches. We're just happy to actually be cutting grass.
Now for some more news regarding Weiskopf #5 putting green. I have already begun prepping an area that will become our temporary green while we make repairs to the damage caused by the freeze/snow on this green. I've gone back and forth on the best method of repair. Due to this green suffering the most extensive damage, starting the first week of May, we'll begin stripping sod from areas containing healthy turf and transplanting it to the #10 green on the Weiskopf. The benefit of using this sod is that it is already cut to proper height, it has received all of the amendments we apply to our greens, and it's grown & maintained by the GCM staff. So this sod should lay in very nicely. Certainly this new sod will take time to grow in and no longer look like transplanted sod, so I ask that if while you're playing Weiskopf #10 and your ball comes to rest in a newly sodded area, please take relief until further notice. After repairing all of Weiskopf #10, we will then strip the rest of Weiskopf #5 and prepare it to be re-sprigged. As a grass farmer, I hate to lose grass and have to disrupt your round of golf, but with the unprecedented low temperatures and heavy snow & ice we experienced, re-sprigging this green was inevitable. I would suspect that by late July you will be putting again on the actual #5 green. We will work diligently to speed up this process, but I feel re-sprigging the green will give us a more uniform surface and recover quicker than re-sodding these big areas.
As always, if you have any questions, comments or concerns regarding the turf on the golf courses, please feel free to contact me via email at dlatham@bentwaterclub.com
Donny Latham
Director of Agronomy
FRIENDLY REMINDERS
From Golf Course Maintenance
- Keep an eye on the daily "Course Conditions & Information" pages on the website. You can save these handy links for daily access to the most up-to-date information about each course prior to play:
Weiskopf & Miller Course Conditions
- Another very easy way to keep up-to-date on all things "golf" is with the Bentwater Mobile App. Click here for details on adding it to your phone.
- Don't forget about our Agronomy Blog. It is my intention to update this weekly with fun and interesting updates on things happening in the world of Bentwater Golf Course Maintenance. We'll provide updates on both big projects and other improvements we have underway or in the works on our beautiful golf courses. The address to this site is www.bentwaterturf.blogspot.com.