Wet and Soggy

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last week. I was a lucky individual and got to go on a vacation to Captiva Island Florida for 5 days. It was a great time with my family as we were able to celebrate my parents 60th birthdays in a magnificent setting with our entire family. I guess however, I picked a great time to be gone as everyone here in Kansas City was blessed with over 3.75" of rain and cool weather. Needless to say the golf course was and is still extremely wet. The rough is growing at a tremendous pace and is going to be a challenge for the next week as we work on mowing it and mowing it again to knock down all the clumps and loose grass. The greens have all but healed up and should be back to normal playing conditions. We have a few greens number 13,14,and 18 that are just a little behind the others as you can still see a few aerification holes if you look closely. I anticipate these healing up and being like all the others by the end of this week with the growing weather that we have been having. Many of you if you have played this last week have noticed we are starting to sod some of the trench lines in the fairways and repair some of the winter kill areas from 2009 that we were unable to repair last year. We will continue with this as my sod provider can get us the sod. When it rains here it rains at the sod farm so we are having to wait for conditions to dry out so they can get equipment in the fields to cut. I am attacking the landing areas first and then will work my way through some of the other areas as our budget allows. I don't see much if any winter kill from this years winter which is a great thing. Most of what we are repairing is from the winter of 2009. I will try and get some pictures uploaded as soon as I get caught up from being gone so stat tuned!!

Cool and Dry

The weather has been Awesome over the last week or so! Man what a great time to be out and about on the golf course. We have been extremely busy here as you can imagine. The weeds and grass are growing at an extremely fast and aggressive rate and have been keeping us on our toes. We are back on our normal mowing schedule and are trying to get the entire golf course mowed out twice a week. This can be a challenge depending on weather conditions and the amount of golf that is being played. I have had some questions already on how often I am mowing the roughs and at what height. I haven't changed our height of cut since we opened in 2007. We are currently at 3" and will stay there all season long. Every year at this time a lot of people think we change our height of cut. We stay at the same height, but the turf grass is just growing at a rapid pace and it is lush and juicy from all the nice weather. Think how much you are having to mow your own lawn right now! Please be patient through this time as it will pay off in the summer time having a good stand of roughs instead of having weak and thin roughs. As you may have noticed we were able to mow the fairways on Friday for the first time this season. It really cleaned them up and they have really started taking off. I would like to remind everyone to please enter the fairways at the green post and stay in the fairway the entire hole and then exit at the cart arrow and red post. This will help our roughs stay in top condition throughout the season. We will continue to work on spraying the clover and broad-leaves in the roughs and fairways. This is an ongoing process and we will continue to make it a priority. Hopefully the cool season grasses in the fairways and around the greens in the zoysia will start to die out over the next week or so. We sprayed them last week and it usually takes a couple of weeks of warm weather to really start to see the results. The greens continue to improve and heal from aeration each day. My hope is they will be back close to 100% by the end of the week. I hope everyone has a great week.

Nice Weather Continues

I hope everyone has been enjoying this nice spring weather as much as I have. We have been extremely busy here at the Creekmoor Maintenance facility over the last week or so. Our greens continue to heal very nicely from the aeration. Putting conditions are still a little on the slow and bumpy end, but I feel they will continue to get better each and every day. Several people have asked me about when the carts are going to let out into the fairways. Hopefully if everything goes as planned we will release carts at the end of this week. My staff and I are trying to get our last application for cool season grass control done on the fairways and once we get this done we will release them. There have have been several questions on what the blue color is in the fairways. That is the non-selective chemical we are currently spraying to control weeds and cool season grass contamination in our fairways. It is a chemical that if tracked around can kill the bentgrass or fescue/bluegrass roughs. This is why we have to limit access to it until we get the fairways completed. I hope everyone has had the opportunity to treat their lawns with the Pre-emergent herbicide to prevent the crabgrass from germinating. I always use April 15th as the deadline as the soil temps and such start to increase after this date causing the crabgrass to start thinking about germinating. The crew will continue to work on edging of the bunkers and checking the sand depths in the bunkers as well. Hope everyone has a great week!

Sunshine

After a cool, windy, and damp start to the week the weather has continued to improve as the week has gone by. We are in the midst of the best weather day of the year today with the highs in the low 70's and little to no wind. I hope everyone has been able to get out and enjoy it. The maintenance staff has had a very productive and tiring week this week. As I mentioned on Tuesday aeration went about as well as it could and one of the big reasons for that was the hard work of my entire staff. Those two days are long and intense and really take a lot of you. However my staff showed up the rest of the week and continued to work hard. We were able to get a few more holes completed on the edging of the bunkers. We have completed holes 13-18 and 8, 9 on the front nine. We were able to mow the greens today for the first time since aeration on Monday. They should continue to heal in this nice weather and will hopefully be back close to 100% in two weeks. Same with the tees. My staff was also able to mow the entire roughs on the golf course. This time of year the roughs get really lush and green and start to grow at a rapid pace. We will try and keep up with it as best we can. Please be patient with it as this

Aeration is Here Once Again

Wow once spring decided it wanted to come it came in a hurry. We have been running around here with our heads cut off this last week. Between the warmer weather and the cleanup from the rains, and then top it off with aeration of our greens and tees we have been extremely busy. We were very lucky yesterday to dodge a huge bullet and miss most of the storms and rain that moved through the area. I know of golf courses just to the North of us a couple of miles that received over 1" of rain out of those storms. Here at Creekmoor we received .10" of rain or less and was able to continue our aeration process. Besides the wet conditions to start the day off yesterday everything went about as good as it could go. We were able to get all the greens completed yesterday and are currently working on our tees today hoping we beat the rain that is suppose to move in later this afternoon. I have been asked how long it will take the greens to be back in good playing shape. My answer is always as long as the weather cooperates they should be close to 100% in about two weeks. The warmer weather really triggered the roughs to grow and they have taken off like gang busters over the last couple of days. The crew is currently mowing the golf course and trying to stay on top of this through the wet season. We are starting to see a little green in our dormant zoysia fairways. I have been getting asked a lot about when carts are going to be let out on the fairways. We are waiting for the zoysia to really start growing and peaking out and then we will release the carts. We are monitoring this everyday and hope to have the carts in the fairways as soon as possible. Once we are finished with aeration we will continue to edge the bunkers, clean up the storm damage from the storm on Friday (limbs on #6 and #3), and will continue our normal maintenance practices.