Fall is Here

I am sorry for not posting anything over the last week or so. I have been extremely busy with tournament preparations for our annual "Friends/Foes" event, and I was out of town at a conference for a few days as well. The weather has been extremely good over the last week. We received about 2.5" of rainfall early last week that came in a short amount of time causing some bunker damage. However it was extremely beneficial to the rest of the golf course as things were getting a bit dry. Also we have been busy chasing the animal damage that occurs every year around this time. The skunks, raccoons, and opossums come out looking for grubs, doing serious damage by digging up the turf scavenging for the grubs. Our line of defense is to try and beat them to the spots and get the grubs treated before they start the digging. However this is extremely tough to get every spot all the time and some nights the animals will find more hot spots then others. We do apply a preventative treatment for grubs during the season but you still get some isolated spots were the chemical didn't get watered down into the ground well enough because that area was hydrophobic or repelled the water. If we find some grubs we treat the areas with an insecticide provided by the chemical company that kills the grubs on contact. Depending on the severity of the digging most of these areas will recover. However there will be some areas that get dug up enough that we will either seed them or sod them to do the repair. It is a long and hard fight but we do it every year and will continue to battle. Today we are starting the aerification process in the roughs around some of the tees and bunker areas. We will move to the green bank areas and the rough after our Wolf Day on Tuesday. Also this week we will began some spot seeding in various thin areas around the golf course as well. Starting this week we will be backing off the mowing of the zoysia fairways and tees to once a week as they have really slowed down. We will probably only mow them one or two more times before we start letting them get some growth to help protect them through the winter months. Have a great week and congratulations to Mike Garozzo and Shorty McKenney on winning the "Friends/Foes" event over the weekend!!!