Summer just keeps rolling along and I apologize for not doing an update in June. Days are flying by and we have already arrived at Member-Guest weekend. This has become a very popular tournament and we always hope to have the course peak at this time. It is good timing for that as the heat of summer hasn’t taken a toll on the turf and the wooga is shining with wildflowers. This year’s participants will find some receptive greens as recent rains have kept the greens softer than usual, but they are still rolling nicely. We don’t do too much different for the event other than a double cut Saturday and maybe another roll on Sunday just to get them rolling a foot faster than our normal green speed.
Our normal summer routine for mowing is greens daily, tees and collars 2x/week, and fairways 2-3x/week. Traps are raked usually on Monday and Friday unless rain necessitates more attention. Add in weekly rough mowing, and this keeps the crew of 7 part timers busy mowing away. They get a lot done in short order and I am thankful for their help.
I mentioned the wooga and the abundance of wildflowers earlier and it has been a stellar year for spiderwort and larkspur shown below. We have mowed a couple more passes around the fairways to try to keep those areas more playable and we will begin mowing more rough this week and continue through July to keep the “wooga” in check with all this rain.
Speaking of rain we have had a lot. Only irrigated two nights in June (other than watering in product). This has been a blessing (reduced irrigation demands) and a curse (increased workload fixing bunker and cart path washouts). The turf looks great now but I am expecting more root diseases as we enter the summer season due to the constantly waterlogged soil we have experienced in May and June. Brown Patch (shown below) while not a soil borne pathogen has already shown itself on ryegrass in collars and I think that has been due to the excessive moisture we have seen lately. In other words the course looks as good now as it will for a couple of months until we head into fall. That being said we still expect great golfing conditions coming up this summer. Hope you can get out to the Horse and enjoy.
