Wow it was cold for a few days last week. It isn't exactly balmy this morning but we will see some reasonable temperatures this afternoon and seemingly for the week ahead. We will hopefully have our snow mold applications down this week and that will signify the end of our spraying and mowing season.
We have finally finished brush hogging down the "high grass areas". I've referred to them as three different names in my short two months here. Started as "fescue areas", but there really isn't enough fescue left to refer to them that way. So I started using the term "native areas" but found out that doesn't really fit either since what we have growing in those areas aren't really natives. "Poorly maintained, overgrown weedy areas" isn't exactly flattering so we will go with high grass areas for at least a few weeks.
Anyway, so we have finished the brush hogging of the high grass areas. We have now moved to mowing them with a rough mower set at five inches. This will do two things: it will do a better job of mulching up the debris that was left by the brush hog and it should start to thin these areas out as they begin to grow back in this spring. If we have time, after mowing them at five inches, we will go back out and mow them at three inches before spring. That is the goal at least but we have other things we'd like to do and weather will be a factor.
We also did some work that really excites me last week: tree work! During my first few weeks I tried to take note of what I felt were the weakest looking greens. Could be just a thin turf stand, poor recovery of ball marks, or poor aeration recovery when compared to some other greens. The 18th green on the West course seemed to show a bit of all three. It is narrow and pin spots are somewhat limited, which I'm sure doesn't help the cause. Going into aeration a bit on the lean side could have also slowed recovery. However, what I took note of was the trees to the eastern side of the green.
It is generally understood that morning and midday shade is more harmful to turf than afternoon shade. I also have no doubt that spring and summer shade causes more problems for us as turf managers than fall and winter shade. Which makes sense right? Shade is just an extra stress for plants. So adding an extra issue to an already stressed plant isn't helping.
To help the situation we removed eight trees between #18 green West and #1 tee West. The trees we removed were shading the green from sunrise all the way through until about 800am. The sun doesn't rise in the same spot everyday. It will move based on time of the year. I have an app on my phone that will show me the suns path on any given date. In this instance I used July 1st since it is around that time that the turf is stressed the most.
It doesn't get better than a cold winter day and a fresh cutting chain ... to me at least. Thanks for reading!
Screenshot of application showing sun rising through the trees ...
Screenshot of application showing sun rising after trees removed ...
Picture standing on the green from further back post tree removal ...
