Monday, March 30, 2015

Opening April 1st

Aerification is going smoothly and the weather is improving, the golf course will be open for play starting April 1st.  We will be opening 4 days sooner than we did last year, just in time for Easter weekend. 

Please take note - we are aerifying greens and fairways today, those projects will be completed by Wednesday, but the scars will remain for a couple weeks.  As the weather continues to improve, the grass will soon fill in, and be back to normal very soon.  With this minor inconvenience out of the way, the membership will have uninterrupted golf until we aerify again, which will be October.
 
We accomplished a lot today, and will continue until dark.  The clean-up will start back up again tomorrow morning. 

We started off early this morning, mowing greens and fairways for the first time of the season.

Taking the winter brown off, revealing the green underneath.

After a layer of topdressing, we punched 3/4" holes down to 4"

We hire out the fairway portion of the aerification, they use 4 machines to accomplish the job in one day.

After we drag the fairways, the contractor will pulverize the cores to break them apart into small pieces.  We then come in behind, dragging the fairway one more time, blowing it off, verticutting it, blowing it off again, then vacuuming up the debris.  After that we focus on cleaning off the irrigation heads and cleaning up any remaining mud in the rough and on the paths.
 
We couldn't have asked for a better day to aerify - sunny and windy.