Rolling Through Summer

It's hard to believe it's already the middle of July.  As usual, summer is flying by.  It always seems that it creeps up on me as we spend so much time and energy getting the course put back in shape after our long winter, its hard to believe that the days are already getting shorter.

We spend so much time in the spring doing all the "extra" things with all the sod work we did this year in the greens and collars, seeding in the fairways, finishing the clubhouse landscaping, fixing and getting the irrigation system dialed in, repairing and edging bunkers, and training staff on all of our equipment.  After we have finally completed all of those "extra" items, we can now focus on simply maintaining the turf on the golf course and ensuring the course is set up to be its best every day.

At this point in the summer, it finally feels like we are finding our rhythm out on the course.  The staff is doing a great job getting the course set up every day and getting all of the little extra things accomplished that most golfers probably never realize go into keeping the course looking great.  The course is finally looking and playing great, as long as the weather continues to cooperate, we are essentially on cruise control for the rest of the season.

Here's a couple of pictures from the crew out getting the course prepped during the last few weeks.

Mowing greens has been great this year with our new John Deere
220E walking mowers.

We also have a new wide area rough mower this year, meaning most
mornings we send out three rough units.

Collin has been crazy busy on the sprayer so far.  We dialed in our fairway spray
program this year to go out every two weeks on fairways, and thus far the results
have been great.

A new process we have been doing this year is dragging the dew off of
fairways in the mornings to help them dry quicker, which has led to
significantly less disease development.

One of other changes this year has been utilizing solid front rollers on our greens
mowers, which helps promote bentgrass growth.  Every other week we are
brooming greens before mowing in order to help cut off some old leaf tissue.

We have a few extra guys trained on changing cups this year, meaning usually
6-7 days a week we are moving cups.

The fairway mowers have their morning routine dialed in and have
the fairways looking better than ever.

As always, bunker maintenance takes up a significant amount of our time
on the course.  We try to keep them regularly edged, smoothed, raked, and
sand pushed up on the faces after all of the rainstorms.