Fairway Recovery Status

It has been 16 days since we finished round one of our over seeding process and we are now seeing some germination. The temperature fluctuations have definitely slowed the process down however. The most promising news is that the areas we thought would only recover from seed have shown signs of regeneration from the crown of the plant. If we could get some consistent warmth, I think we will see the recovery process really accelerate.

 



As much as I would love to hold off on additional seeding until we get consistent weather and a real assessment of the success of the initial seeding, we just don't have the time to chance it. Our window to get seed in the ground, germinated, and mature by this summer continues to narrow. Because of this, we have started an additional round of fairway seeding this week, and will continue this until we have hit every fairway again. Fortunately many fairways only need spot seeding, but a few of the most exposed fairways will be completely seeded again. There are even a handful of severely sloped areas around the greens that we will hydro seed. These areas are too steep to run a seeder over them so the hydro mulch will act as artificial soil, providing the needed seed/soil contact and erosion stabilization.

I haven't spent a lot of time discussing greens in any of the posts because they survived pretty well. They are not without a few stressed areas but of the 261,360 square feet of greens we maintain, I  would estimate we only have around 1,000 square feet of visibly stressed bent grass. We need to be careful though, relying solely on a visual assessment of the canopy to judge the health of the turf can get you in trouble. Even the areas that appear healthy are most likely recovering from the stress of the winter. A lot of energy went into surviving this last winter and regenerating this spring. We will take it a little easy on them over the next few weeks as we prepare them for spring aerification.

Overall, I have seen much improvement over the last five days and I expect that to continue. The slow 1/2" of rain yesterday was priceless. We are being pretty aggressive in regards to getting the place back to where we want it. We appreciate your understanding and patience.

On a side note we are putting together plans to allow carts off paths but only into the rough. We hope to have the logistics of policing this figured out by the weekend. Please, please police yourself and those around you so we can continue to keep traffic off the fairways.