Noah Gessler, Golf Course Superintendent
Summer is a very busy time for golf maintenance. It is the time of year when we have the most growth of the turf and we are doing a lot of mowing, fertilizing, and spraying to improve conditions. We also get some help with the weather with some summer rains and humidity. The rains this summer have not been plentiful as yet, but the humidity creates really good growing conditions for the Bermudagrass, and we still have some time.
Summer is also the time when we have less play on the courses, so we are able to rotate through some course closures for a few days every other week. We use these closures primarily to aerify the courses. Greens are aerified three times per summer, and we also do the tees twice and the fairways once. Rough is also done later in the summer. These processes involve a lot of steps, including topdressing, fertilizing, and a lot of clean-up. While aerifying can be disruptive to play in the short term, it helps the turf over the long haul by reducing compaction of the soil and helping air and water get into the soil. The summer months are the only time we can do this, because the turf is actively growing and it has the ability to recover.
As we wind down summer and head into fall, all three courses will be open and available for play. As we did the past two years, the only overseeding we will do is on the practice areas. We apply special turf pigments and paints to give the courses color during the winter months. Not overseeding saves a tremendous amount of water and helps the Bermudagrass be strong over the long term. It also means that we don’t have to close the courses during parts of September and October when relief from the hot summer finally arrives and the weather is great for playing golf. Since it typically doesn’t get too cold until around Thanksgiving, we have great golf weather to enjoy until then.