Mowing Heights and Plant Health

With winter on the horizon I guess, I wanted to talk about mowing heights in relation to winterkill and plant health .The  2014,15 winters was the worst  we have seen in a while and we had some winterkill as everyone saw. The biggest factor the temperatures, we cannot control so we have to deal with what we can control like mowing heights. Bermuda grass can tolerate low mowing heights but the more plant up top means  more roots  and rhizomes on the bottom which is true with any plant. My point is we raise mowing heights through the growing season to get the plant as healthy as we can going into winter .This  enables the plant to store more energy in its roots and stuff to combat low temperatures drought ,traffic , snow and ice. Just a little information on that factor and hopefully this winter won't be as bad as the last few.

Golf Course News

The golf course is in pretty good shape. I do have some concerns about some traffic issues on a couple of holes. Please obey all cart signs and ropes you will be seeing more in the future.We will be edging paths over the next few months,cleaning out some trees around the course and trying to kill that god awful poa in the fairways.Next greens aerification mid march with a little extra on 15 we have struggled with that green since Irene and we will be doing some different stuff to that in the spring.

Winter Work

We will be doing our normal winter projects in the winter months ahead .Edging cartpaths ,cleaning up overgrown areas around some tee boxes and fixing up some bunker faces.The spring aerification schedule should be out soon.

GREENS AERIFICATION

We will be core aerifying the greens on the 28th and 29th of May.Should take a week or so to heal.

Greens Maintanence

In the upcoming weeks we will be doing light topdressings to improve the thatch layer and to improve ball role. The cold weather has postponed any heavy topdressing because they are not growing much.We will be fertilizing again soon as well.The next aerification will be in early june.

GREENS AERIFICATION

We will be deep tining the greens starting Mon the 18th.

Tee and Fairway Aerification

In the coming weeks we will be aerifing the bermuda grass on the golf course.The process on the  tees is to aerify pulling a core then verticutting to remove thatch blowing off the debris,mowing to clean up.On fairways we will aerify pulling a core dragging the core back in then mowing to clean up.This needs to be done to remove thatch and to relieve compaction from equipment and especially cart traffic.We should finish up in about two weeks.