So what has my crew done in the last 3 months? We on March 18 we aerified our greens. We aerify to promote root growth, allow oxygen exchange with the soil, relieve any compaction, and allow better water movement. That is only a few of the reasons, but all golfers want to know is how long will it take to recover. This season recovery took a little longer due to cold temperatures and minimal sunlight during our time of aerifying. Here is a quick look at what happened one night when running irrigation.
My process for aerificaton is pretty straight forward. A week before I go out with a foliar application of fertilizer to help stimulate growth. Once we start pulling cores out comes the cleanup. What we do is scoop up the plugs with shovels and reuse the corse in necessary areas. After all of the plugs are harvested, we start topdressing. We topdress to fill in the empty holes to help provide a nice growing medium for bentgrass to creep into. The day following topdressing I will out and apply a graular fertlizer, this season it was 12-3-12. Great product and helped fill in the holes.
The spacing that we use on the aerifer is 2x2 with half inch diameter tines. The tines on average penetrate the green to a depth of 3-4 inches 
Another project that we accomplished this spring was some drain work in approaches and bunkers. Lets start with #13 approach. My foreman and I were puzzled when we dug up a drain pipe to find out that it had no outlet, just emptied in the approach. What we ended up doing was tieing into the same drain pipe and adding 30 of new drain tile to capture more water. While we are on the topic of drains I must say this, our bunker drainage is awful. We tired to remedy a couple holes though. What we did was go into the bunker drains, dig them up, add new gravel, and add fresh sand over the line so the old silt contaminated sand would not stop water movement. As you can see in the picture to the right we copletely dug a new line becuase the original drain path did not drain down slope but up slope.
A few other things that were accomplished at the OCGC were fertlizer and pre emergent herbicide applications to the roughs, fairways, and tees. Along with a pre emergent going out, I applicated 2-4d for control of spring weeds that we encountered.
With every season there is some sort of change, well this year mine was to my fertilizer package that I apply to fairways. Redox. The products that I am using are C85 and the Fairway flowable. My obervations thus are positive and I will keep anyone updated.
One last thing I would like to point out, on #9 we have a 3 level lake with 3 water falls. I have had problems with this feature ever since I took over here. The problem lies in the lower pond. It is plenty deep but not wide enough, so when the pump is pumping the water up the hill it drops the pond at least 2-3 feet. What I did was add a new lip/damn on the back of the feature where water actually flows into the rough on #9. What I did was take some clay and shape it to fit the present contour then packed it with Bentonite to help seal any holes. Here is the presod finished product.
And finally the big screw up is what I like to call it. Starting in the spring time I need to get out and make fungicide applicaions to the greens, well with those fungicides I mix in fertlizer and PGRs. What I am confident happened was the amount of PGR and DMI fungicide I had in 1 spray tank was. The biggest issue I am having with this is the color of the turfgrass. It started as an ugly bronze brown to becomea nice green again. The photo on the bottom shows a before picture of a green taken last Monday. On the right is a picture taken today.
This is very interesting to observe every day. I notice different dew patterns in the morning which has my pro worried to death it seems.
Notice the right of this picture where the dew pattern in constant and heavy, that is an area that wasn't sprayed, but notice the area on the left that was sprayed, looks very stressd out. The clipping yield has yet to get back to normal, but the color is getting there. Last Monday I applied .06 lbs of N in the form of 18-3-6 Foliar Pak, and just yesterday I applied another .06 lbs of N in the form o 18-3-6 Foliar Pak along with Promote 4-0-1, fungicide, and only 1 PGR to hold off any rebound effect I may run into.
Well again,thanks for listening to me talk about nothing maybe. Hopefully some of you supertintendents out there learn a lesson from me on not applying too much PGR with DMI in the tank. I know I learned my lesson.
Chase
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