Aeration and Bermuda grass update

March is here. Trees have started to bud, daffodils are up and growing, and the golf season is just around the corner. The turf has started to break dormancy and we have had some very spring-like temperatures over the last few weeks. With all that being said, as I write this, it is 17 degrees at the club!

Just to get everyone up to speed on our spring, we aerated greens this past week. We had the smallest of windows and the smallest of staff, but everyone did a great job and we aerated holes 1-18. We intend to do the practice greens later this week. While this is three weeks ahead of our scheduled aeration dates, it is the exact same time we were able to aerate the greens last year. Here is an excerpt from a past post discussing our reasoning for early aeration:

There are two main reasons for us wanting to start aeration as soon as we can. First, if the weather is conducive to allowing aeration then it will also be conducive to allow healing. By aerating sooner we will allow for more healing time and less impact on the start of the golf season. Second, by aerating early, we would be able to separate our aeration procedure from our seed head control program. You can read more about seed head control here or more about aeration healing and seed heads here. Bottom line is, if we aerate early enough, one practice won’t impact the other. One might wonder, then why we don’t just schedule aeration for an earlier time? We can’t count on the weather being favorable enough to plan aeration for too early. If it’s too wet or too cold and we miss our scheduled time, then we are stuck trying to fit it in around the early season golf. So we stick with our mid-March schedule and hope for earlier. This way, if we can’t do it early, but we are able to do it at our regularly scheduled time, the members are only impacted exactly as it was scheduled to happen and no worse.

So, while the temperature was cold this past weekend, overall, the trend looks normal or slightly warmer than normal, so healing should proceed nicely.

The Bermuda grass was also affected by the warmer than normal February. We spotted green Bermuda grass leaves on 2/12, which is the earliest in several years. By the end of February, there were visibly green patches on some of the southern facing slopes. The cold snap we experienced this past weekend will stunt any progress, but we are off to a fast start. But before we all get our hopes up of having green fairways by mid-March, we should expect a few more surprises in March (like the dusting of snow we had this past Friday morning). Nevertheless, any progress in February and March should help us towards earlier than normal green Bermuda grass.

Also, we will be returning to weekly posts March thru October. Thank you.

Etiquette Reminder of the Month

Please do not walk around the lip of a bunker. This can cause the sod edge to slide into the sand. Instead walk through the bunker and rake your disturbance on your way back out.

See you on the course!

Joe

jvillegas@bwrc.org