Summer Heat!

Warm weather is here.  Currently my weather station is reading 82 degrees with a real feel of 91, warm I must say.  Warmth and humidity was what we needed though to get this grass on the greens to pop and it sure has.  In the last couple of days we have seen significant progress in growth and color.  You may have noticed some brown patches on some of the greens such as this one below.

We've been diagnosing this as some form of cool season fungus with the rain and cooler temps.  Our spray applications have been covering everything in the book but still these patches persisted.  This morning Derek Settle, a pathologist from the CDGA stopped by the club to take a look at things.  He said he's been seeing this type of patch disease being evident at other clubs around Chicago on specifically older greens with older turfs.  He believes it is a "Foliar Anthracnose" attacking only older types of bentgrass, that's why it is so spotty and patch like.  He took a plug from one of our greens to incubate and get a definite diagnosis but feels as it warms and the bentgrass wakes up it will recover and fade away.  The bent has just been so week with these cooler temps.

With the temps coming up we have entered a prime time for seeding and that is what we're doing in the rough.  Through out the end of last week and this week we've been targeting areas in the rough that are week.  Lots of these areas are in heavily tree'd areas where the turf has become week, especially after last fall when it was very dry.  These areas have no irrigation so the trees won the battle for any extra moisture.  The areas have been seeded with a "Shady" turf mix, which includes fescues, bluegrass, and rye grass.  Natural rainfall is need now to get the seed to germinate as again there is no irrigation in these areas.  Pictured below is the machine we used and what the turf looks like after going through.

Lastly, we embarked on fixing the drainage issues with 12 greenside bunker.  Again as explained before we have issues of large amounts of water coming through the trees between 7 and 12 and entering the bunker.  These large and fast flowing amounts of water would wash out the bunker and create a great deal of work to reclaim the bunker.  What needed done was to raise the back side of the bunker and contour it to divert the water around the bunker and out to the fairway where the drains are located.  As we dug into this project we also discovered another large tile broken which was also backing up the water.  The combination of both improvements should put an end to this problem.  Here are some pictures of what the bunker would look like after the rains as well as some before and after the work was completed to raise the back side.

We keep moving along as the season get deeper into the spring and start of summer.  Progress is always great to see and we are seeing it.