3.12.26

March is the best time of year at Shadow Hawk in my opinion. Winter Dormancy has given way to Spring green up and it's great to see all the turf and landscaping around the club coming into full color.

As we've continued to lower the heights of cut on the putting surfaces, one observation we've noticed from them is their checkboard appearance, especially the practice putting green by #1 tee and the cocktail green.

Here is a good example closer up. See the darker green turf and the lighter areas next to it in the middle of the frame?

The darker areas are low spots and the lighter areas are higher spots on the turf canopy. As the mower passes over the grass, it's clipping the higher spots a little bit more (hence the lighter color) and it passes right over the darker areas (lower spots).

Why is this? In my opinion, these practice greens were the last ones constructed and were probably still the softest before we put the grass sprigs down on them to start growing them in. The greens on 1-18 were constructed first, beginning in June, and were able to receive more rainfall and irrigation to help compact the sand. The practice greens were constructed the week before we grassed them. Our construction team still followed best practices for firming them up and did everything in their control to make them as good as they could.

The softer conditions caused the sand to move and shift just a bit more as we passed the equipment over the grass when we mowed, rolled, and grew in the surfaces.

How do we make this better? To help combat the high and low spots, I'll begin to aerify more frequently, beginning in March. Pulling a core will soften up the ground and allow me to use our heavy rollers to help smooth up / true up the putting surfaces. I'll also use a different type of brush that will help me distribute sand to lower spots and push it off of high spots.

Again, luckily we are mostly just seeing this on a couple of our practice putting greens. The plan is to attack 1/3rd of the green at a time so we have plenty of good grass to putt on while we work the other areas.

On the course, we continue to utilize turning boards to help reduce the mechanical stress on the edges of our putting greens and collars.

We use our green brushes to do a "cleanup" pass before the mowers mow the rest of the putting surface. The brush removes the dew and serves as a visual cue for my operators to lift their machine up when they pass through these areas.

We've had some edges of the greens struggle throughout the winter months so to combat this, I have a specialized mower that only mows these parts of the greens. It's set a bit higher than our current height of cut and it still has the smooth front roller. Both of these set up changes reduce the stress on the turf.

I've been happy with the results so far and with the better growing conditions in February and early March, we've seen some of these weak areas start to heal up.

To combat encroachment from the collars, we are on a biweekly edging schedule.

This stick edger creates a slit in the green where it meets the collar and again, serves as a visual cue for my operators so they know exactly where the edge of the green is. When our operator mows the "cleanup" pass, they ride the edge of the slit in the green and mow all the way to that line.

Encroachment happens naturally over time but we try and do what we can to slow its progress.

We recently tried a new topdressing sand with the goal of picking up some additional speed heading into the weekends. We typically topdress on Mondays when we have our half day closures and would see nice results picking up some additional speed.

With this newer sand we are using, it's very fine and can easily be rolled into the canopy after we apply it. That's always the concern with sand applications closer to busy play days (aka Friday and Saturdays) but this sand did a good job of being absorbed into the putting surfaces.

Initially, I love the results. These readings were taken with our USGA Deacon Ball on Thursday, March 12th. The reading on the left was at 7:16am from the cocktail green and we stimped a 9'10" after a morning mow and roll.

The reading on the right was taken with our USGA Deacon Ball after a PM topdressing and roll and we stimped a 10'11" on the cocktail green.

This data and observations has me rethinking when and how we topdress the greens, I'm going to be trying out some new practices moving forward to keep our speeds more consistent.

Another goal of ours is to better understand speeds between each of our greens. We've recently started to stimp more of our greens on a daily basis to better understand where we have a "fast green" and where we have a "slow green". The chart above shows the range of speeds we collected on a March morning. Speeds were as fast as 10'8" and as slow as 9'10" this specific morning.

To better enhance the playing experience, our goal is to try and get speed as uniform as possible.

We switched up our scheduling and how we move the crew around the course to allow us to better track our speeds, make adjustments on the fly, and be able to correct any speed differences before the first group hits their opening tee shot.

Roughs on the course we're scalped down the last week of February to remove dead grass tissue and to allow more sunlight to get down to the new grass blades that are starting to grow.

This process also helps us with the efficacy of our pre-emerge herbicides as it allows our products to have less interference as it makes it way through the thatch layer and down into the soil, where it locks in to help prevent weeds from growing.

One training point I've been working on with the crew when we mow our approaches is to avoid making sharp turns in these areas. To do this, we make a pass with our machine, lift up the blades, back up into position, and proceed with our next pass.

We have some tight pinch points in these turf areas around the course and I've been encouraged with the buy in and execution by our operators this Spring.

Pretty special place we have here. Love the morning sunrises and some of the cool pictures we get to share.

Thanks for reading and for being a member,

Willie