We have had a very busy last 2 weeks. This time of the year brings cooler nights and i am trying to take advantage of this to encourage recovery on the golf course from the stressful summer. You can already see that many of the poa trivilas dormant areas in the fairways are coming back to life. There are some areas that will not and these will be overseeded in the next few weeks. All the fairways and tees were verticut last week. Verticutting encourages more lateral growth and my goal is to help the turf along in filling some of the voids left from the poa trivials. Yesterday we started to verticut the approaches on the front nine. With the hot humid weather this year the turf really needs to be thinned out since I am starting to see some scalping. I am topdressing all the greens and appoaches today to help dilute the organic matter even more. I will most likely verticut all the greens next week as well as topdress the greens and approaches again. We will also seed and aerate a lot of the other areas in hopes that next year the bentgrass will take over. The putting green was verticut yesterday and topdressed. I am sure that you have noticed a complete turn around with the putting green compared to 2 months ago, there is very little moss left and the green is very healthy. Last week, we core aerifed the range tee and overseeded with a low mow kentucky bluegrass blend. I am encouraged by our progress on the range tee this year. I am starting to see some kentucky bluegrass taking over . We will continue to overseeded the rest of the year. The range tee gets so much use that bentgrass just can not recover fast enough using the bluegrass the tee should be more stable do to the growth characteristics of the bluegrass over bentgrass.
In the upcoming weeks we will be verticutting the fariways and tees again. I would like to do this at least another 3 times before the end of the year. We have not spiked the fairways even close to enough this year and we will be spiking the fairways starting next week and make every attempt to get in 3 more before the end of the season.
Overall I feel the golf course is in fine shape and I hope that you will be able to enjoy the course this week the weather looks to be great
Neil