Friday, October 19, 2012

Maintenance Alert: Greens!

All putting greens on the Bull's Eye Course will be "Deep Tined" using a Verti Drain starting Monday October 22, 2012.  It is our goal to puncture several layers in the greens soil profile to foster better surface/internal water drainage and oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange.  All factors that inhibit rooting depth.

Greens will be closed while they are being worked on, rolled and reopened for play.  Greens will once again be taken out of play as we work on back filling open holes with topdressing sands.  All 20 greens on your course will be treated with select greens "punched" twice to maximize soil modification.

The verti-draining process will take approximately 12 hours to complete, however back filling of holes with topdressing is a slow and tedious process and will take hopefully no more than three days to complete.  Green surfaces must be completely dry for us to work the sand back into the holes.

The last time our greens were deep tined was in 2005.  Here is a picture of a deep tine hole filled with sand that no longer functions effectively as it is cut off from the surface.  Normally you would find turf roots filling this column.  Channels cut to the surface will greatly assist in surface drainage hopefully minimizing our exposure to surface waters that caused substantial winter kill to our putting green the past two winters.  This is just the first step of many that we should be doing to guard against turf loss.  Thanks for your patience.  _Mk