Winning Ways and Mulching Leaves

It is a beautiful time of year here at Wolf Creek. The trees are changing colors, the zoysia is going dormant, and the cool season roughs are as green as they get all year. With all these changes comes a lot of mulching of the leaves,picking up hedge balls and acorns, and blowing leaves out of bunkers and cart paths that fall from all the trees around the golf course. We have been extremely busy trying to keep up with what is falling naturally and what the wind has been blowing down also. It looks like over the next week or so we will be getting back into some frosty mornings. If you are planning to play early I appreciate your patients when we do have frost delays as we will try to get you out on the golf course as soon as possible. Also I posted a little video a few weeks ago on the blog detailing why frost delays happen and why we are so diligent about making sure it is gone first before play starts. If you would like to look at that video again you can look in the archives of the blog over on the right side tool bar. Today we are doing some sodding on #6 collar to convert it from the Penn Links bentgrass that it currently is to A4 bentgrass. I have attached some photos below of the crew laying the new sod into place. We only have a few more holes left to do before we have all the collars on the golf course converted to a much more wear and heat tolerant turf. This will probably be the last collar this year, but our plan is to convert the remaining holes next fall. Yesterday morning we applied a thin layer of topdressing on the greens and pin spiked them to help keep the surface area open to allow for water and oxygen to get into the root-zone. With the rolling and mowing practices that we use this is a necessary practice to help keep our greens in top form. A lot of members have been asking when we are going to be starting on redoing the wall on #5. We are currently waiting on approval and permitting from the Core of Engineers. Once we get the approval it should be a matter of time before we start. I will keep everyone informed as the process moves forward. Have a great week and hopefully the Royals can duplicate 1985 and make a comeback from down 3-2 in the series and bring home the World Series!! Also a huge Congratulations to our own Robert Streb on winning his first of many PGA Tour events as he won in a dramatic three man playoff over the weekend at the McGladrey Classic! It couldn't have happened to a better guy Congrats Robert!!

Perfect Weather and World Series

Our recent weather conditions over the past week have been picture perfect! We have been having high temperatures in the mid to upper 70s all week and lows in the mid 40s, which has resulted in a lot of sunshine, minimal clouds,and hardly any wind. It couldn't of happened at a better time for us as we were able to provide great course conditions for the KCGA Kansas City Masters tournament, that was held on Monday and Tuesday. Congratulations to our own Mark Terranova on winning the event! Mark played some outstanding golf this week and closed it out in style birding three holes on the back nine coming down the stretch. I have attached a picture of Mark below with the winning trophy. This past week the maintenance team was able to get all the overseeding done on the golf course after the rains and wet conditions we have had recently preventing us from finishing. We still lack a little bit more to do on our Driving Range and are hoping we will get this done in the next day or two as time is running out to get the seed to germinate before the temperature and frost start setting in regularly. Also all the edging of the bunkers was completed, giving the bunkers a much cleaner and well maintained look. The dry weather conditions have allowed us to finally get caught up on the mowing in the roughs and green banks eliminating the clumps of grass clippings that were around from mowing after the rains last week and the leaves that are starting to fall from the trees. Speaking of trees it is absolutely beautiful out here at the course as all the Fall colors are in full effect. If you haven't been out here you need to soon before all the leaves fall. Our plan this week is to finish up all overseeding and spot sodding in the roughs. Also we are going to be doing some more collar conversions on a few holes, continuing our three year plan of converting all of our greens collars from Penn Links bentgrass to A4 bentgrass. The holes we are looking to do this week are #4,6,& possibly 8. We are doing this to make our greens complexes consistent, but also we feel the A4 is more traffic tolerant and holds up better under the summer stresses. Well we have waited 29 years for the Royals to make the Postseason and man have they been fun to watch this season. Game 1 of the World Series last night didn't go as planned for them, but I am confident they will get it turned around tonight! This town has been on fire this past week or so and it has been a lot of fun to see. Go Royals!!!

Wet Conditions Continue

What is the old saying "When it rains it pours"? Well that is exactly what has been happening here in KC over the past couple of days. We have been getting hammered with a lot of rain. Yesterday's 2" rain brought us up to roughly 8" of rain over the last 8 days or so. Needless to say course conditions are very wet and the rough is tall and thick. The crew has been out this morning getting the cart paths cleaned up from all the debris and are working on getting the bunkers repaired. A positive out of yesterday's storm is that the rain was at a nice steady pace and wasn't a down pour so our bunkers didn't sustain much damage. However there are still a few holding water until the creek goes down and the drainage can let the water out. Also today we are continuing on edging of the bunkers to give them that nice clean and crisp look going into the winter. I have attached a picture below showing how we do the edging. We hope to have some mowers out in some isolated areas maybe later today after this wind blows a bit and helps do some drying out. It will probably be at least tomorrow before we can even think about mowing any rough. I hope everyone has another great week! Go ROYALS!!

Soggy and Wet Course Update

Wet soggy conditions have continued over the past two days as we have been having a lot of rainfall. Over the last two weeks we have now received over 6" of rain. Today alone we have received about 2.25". Needless to say the course conditions are pretty wet and damp. Today's rain has been a steady rain so the bunkers aren't as bad as they were last week when it took us three days to repair them. We hope to have them repaired this weekend if the rains slow down. Today we were able to get out and do some blowing and get all the debris that blew down picked up. Also we kept working on edging of the bunkers and started to repair the washed out bunkers once the rain started to slow down this morning. I hope everyone has a great weekend. Hopefully the Royals will be able to play their game tonight, but I think it is going to be very tough with all the rain that is headed towards Baltimore.

Perfect Weather Week

The weather over the past week or so has been about as perfect as you can ask for. High temperatures have been in the mid 70's and the lows have been in the high 30's to low 40's. We have had a few frosty mornings over the past week or so which has caused a few morning delays. I appreciate everyone's patience this time of the year during these delays. We have a unique property with the elevation differences and unfortunately #1,2,3,11,& 12 are some of the slowest holes to burn frost off of due to the shade and proximity to the creek. I have attached an informational video on frost and the damage that can be caused by it if golfers walk on it. Since my last blog post last week we have been busy cleaning up after the big 3.75" rain last weekend and getting our bunkers back into shape. Also we were able to get all the rough aerification completed on the entire golf course prior to the rain which was huge. However we still have to do some spot seeding in the roughs on holes #15-18 and the driving range once the parts for our seeder arrive and we can get it repaired after breaking down late last week. Hopefully in the next couple of days we will start to see some good seed germination in the areas we over seeded. I am just starting to see a few little seedlings start to come up so over the next few days we should start to see it. The animal damage caused from the racoons and skunks has slowed a bit over the last week or so. Hopefully this continues and we are staying in front of it a bit and beating them to the spots of grubs and earthworms and getting them treated before they have a chance to dig. However there are still a few isolated areas each day that we will continue to treat and repair as needed. Have a great week!

Fall Weather and Rain

It has been a while since I have posted here on the blog. I have been out of town attending an education seminar that I was selected to attend in Clayton, North Carolina last week and then have been extremely busy getting caught up here since I finally got home on Saturday afternoon after all of the flight cancellations on Friday. Our weather over the last week or so has been perfect! Highs in the 80s and lows in the 60s. The maintenance team has been taking advantage of it and have been extremely busy. Our fall aeration program in the roughs has almost been completed as we completed the golf course this morning. All that we have left is the driving range area. I appreciate everyone's patience during this process. I know it makes things a little messy for a few days but it is an extremely important agronomic practice to keep our roughs in top shape. Also we are working on doing our overseeding in a few areas. The amount of overseeding is substantially less then in years past, but we still have some thin areas where our heads don't hit consistently or there has been some animal damage that need to be addressed. We continue to battle the animal damage in the roughs. It has been a battle that I feel we have had pretty good luck with so far this year with our diligence of checking everyday and treating the grub areas before the animals find them and do the digging. We will have to stay on this plan until the frost start happening and the grubs will eventually move down into the soil where the animals can't get them. On Monday we did another light topdressing on the greens to help them continue to stay firm, fast, and smooth. They are in great shape right now as they usually are in the fall and should continue to improve. The zoysia fairways and tees have really slowed down their growth over the past week with the cooler temperatures and shorter days. Like I have talked about in previous blog post I am going to stop mowing and let them grow some leaf tissue to help protect them through the winter months so my plan right now is to stop mowing the fairways unless we get a drastic change in out weather pattern. There is a possibility that we could still mow the tees another time or two since they don't take any cart traffic like the fairways do. I have attached a few photos of the rough aerifier, the plugs after the aerifier goes through, and the overseeder to show the equipment that we use. Have a great week and man what a game last night!!!!