A New Hope, Catching Up, New Toy and Protection!

Hello and welcome to "The Greenkeeper"!  Today is Friday, April 27, 2012 and Guest Day at Carolina Golf Club is off to a spectacular beginning.  Greens were both mowed and rolled today for our fun competition and the weather is the best its been since...well, you know what I mean.  Some of you may be asking where I have been lately considering I haven't posted an update in a few weeks.  I have been here at Carolina working diligently with my staff to prepare the course for the Pre-Qualifying and Qualifying Tournaments for the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship (the Pre-Qualifying Tournament was yesterday).  Also, I have been praying the above normal weather we experienced in March would quickly return.  It seems we replaced nearly 15,000 square feet of bermudagrass sod on our green's collars and immediately Mother Nature couldn't make up her mind whether it was March or May.  Considering it was April all this time and March felt mostly like May and April felt mostly like March, what will May feel like?  Help me Jim Cantore, you're my only hope!

Since my last blog update, my staff and I installed new irrigation on the event lawn (my apologies for not having pictures of this project).  Prior to the new patio construction the lawn area was irrigated with a couple of golf course irrigation heads.  Those have been removed and we installed new, smaller sports field heads to give us greater coverage and control... all while ensuring we are only watering the event lawn and not the new patio!  In the past few weeks we have also had all tree stumps removed with a stump grinder.  Stump holes were filled with soil and either sodded to bermudagrass or seeded with our natural area seed mix and mulched.  We rerouted the discharge line of the well located near the creek crossing between the 4th and 17th holes.  The well now discharges upstream in the retention pond left of #15 fairway and supplies a continuous stream along the creek channel.  All landscape beds on the property have received a fresh supply of mulch (this includes parking lot islands, club house and pool landscape areas and golf course trees).  Sprinkler heads were recently edged and we continue to fine tune the golf course as we patiently wait for Mother Nature to turn on the heat and bring the bermudagrass mowing season upon us full speed ahead!

In other golf course maintenance news, the Board of Governors approved (with the recommendation from the Greens Committee) the acquisition of an AeraVator!  I know, you are thrilled...

Actually, I am very excited about our new "toy" and once the qualifying tournaments are complete I intend to use it very extensively.  The AeraVator uses both solid tines and vibratory action to create a hole and "shatter" the soil profile simultaneously thus alleviating compaction in extreme cases.  I proposed the acquisition to the Greens Committee earlier this year as a great tool to help us combat the over compacted turf in many areas where traffic is unreasonably high.  The machine does NOT remove a core of soil thus the impact to the surface and playability is minimal.  As we begin to incorporate the unit into our maintenance regime I will post more pictures as well as before and afters.

Also, the Greens Committee decided to contract Arborguard to assess and install lightning protection on our property's specimen hardwood trees.  I met with their certified arborist, Barry Gemberling to tour the entire course earlier this month.

We identified 13 specimen oak and poplar trees worthy of protection based either on appearance/size and/or strategic impact of the golf hole.  Barry and his team were great to work with and completed the task in three days.  Arborguard also performed soil injection "therapy" to those same selected trees to aid their ability to survive in a golf course turf environment.

That's all for now!  I need to go and get ready for a busy weekend of member and guest play as well as practice rounds for the Monday qualifying tournament.  I will post a new update sometime Tuesday sharing information with each of you regarding the course set up for the qualifying tournaments and anything else I may think of along the way.  Until then...

See you on the course,

Matthew Wharton

Golf Course Superintendent