November 6, 2014
Fall is upon us and apparently winter is right around the
corner. The fall is a good time to
complete minor projects on the course and remove some aging trees. Unfortunately this fall has been extremely
wet and it appears some snow is in the nearby forecast.
A few fall tasks have
already been completed on the golf course.
The biggest one being the leaf clean up.
Pike Lake has hundreds of beautiful old trees that make the course stand
out in the summer time. The fall is a
different story in that they drop their thousands of leaves and make for a
daunting task to clean them up. This
year, the leaf clean up on the course took well over a month with a few spots
left to tidy up as of November 6. The
leaves are either mulched in sunny, rough sites or blown to cart paths and
vacuumed up using our Giant-Vac. A few trees won’t be there to greet you in the
spring. The left hand side of #11,
adjacent to the tees and beginning of the fairway, were cleared back to allow
more room to tee off. Particularly from the black and white tee decks.
During the second
week of November all the greens were core aerified using ½” hollow tines. The cores were removed from the greens and a
heavy topdress of sand was spread on top.
The rainy weather made it tough to brush the sand into the holes. Any remaining holes without sand will be
topped up in the spring time when conditions will allow us to do so. The benefits of a core aerification are
similar to those of a solid tine aerification in that it allows air and water
to percolate the surface. But a core aerification is superior to a solid tine
one in that it removes thatch from the green.
If you remember, thatch is that spongy layer below the grass that builds
up over time and impedes water and nutrients from entering the soil. Thatch is a main culprit of poor performing
putting greens so it’s important that we core aerify 1-2 times per season to
remove some of the thatch and replace it with good performing sand. The core aerification also allows us to remove
poor performing silts and clay from the older putting greens and replace it
with sand. Since only one aerification
was in the plans this season, large tines were necessary. It’s a grueling
process to get rid of all the cores.
Many thanks to the staff and volunteers that helped in the removal of
all those cores.
There’s a photo of #11 green after the aerifier has made a
pass and another photo showing the water holding capabilities of the thatch on
#2 links green.
