Spring Aerification Update Part IV

Monday March 25th was at one point forecasted to be raining as I chronicled is our previous Spring Aeration Updates. Fortunately the rain forecast stalled and your ready to go GCM staff  aerated all 18 regulation greens as well as the upper putting green before it started raining. Unfortunately  the subsequent 11 days of weather has produced only 1 day of sunshine. The rain that was associated with these 11 dreary days did help push sand downwards into the surface, but  as we all learned in grammar school science class, photosynthesis requires sunlight to make carbohydrate food for plant growth.

#3 Green 10 days out from core aeration on 3/25/19. With some sun, the very visible
holes would be close to covered by now.

Because of this dreariness, I would say the greens are at least a week behind their normal recovery curve. It wont stay dreary forever so as soon as we get some sustained sunlight those aeration holes will grow over. In the mean time we will continue to roll and mow as well as lightly sand topdress the surfaces to produce some semblance of putting quality.

Close up of a green 10 days out from core aeration on 3/25/19.

We were able to get the fairways aerated with solid tines during this period as well as getting them topdressed with sand. The solid tine pattern recovers much quicker and can be done in cloudy, semi wet weather  as opposed to pulling a core which would have required dry weather to both punch and clean up.

As you can see, we can solid tine aerate when it is a little wet. This process recovers much quicker
but does not remove any excess organic matter.

Solid tine aeration pattern. These holes are about 4" deep. You can see that the fairway
height grass almost hides the opening of the hole. Hence the ultra quick recovery
of solid tine aeration.

So as soon as we get some sun the greens will recover from aeration quickly and we can get our putting quality back in short period of time. Thanks as always for your support.

New Golf Course Maintenance Equipment Arrives

We recently received a nice influx of golf course maintenance equipment from Toro at Granite Bay and wanted to share it with our members.  You can probably imagine it takes allot of different types of equipment to maintain a golf course and it all eventually wears out. We have mowers and blowers and rollers and aerifyers, just to name a few. It also takes allot of utility vehicles to move GCM workers, tools and materials around the golf course as well as moving debris and such off the golf course.

New Toro Equipment on display on the circle lawn shortly after arrival

This recent influx of new equipment are primarily replacements for older pieces of equipment giving us more flexibility and backup when we  experience unexpected malfunctions which happens more then we would like. Below are some close-ups and descriptions of the recent pieces of equipment we received for those who are interested.

Toro Triflex greens mower. This is our second  new triplex greens mower that will really help when we want to double cut greens. This mower is used exclusively on the putting surfaces.

Similar to the Toro Triflex above is a Toro 3250 triplex that is primarily used on tee's and approaches. This mower is our third "newer"  utility triplex giving us ultimate flexibility as it can operate attachments for vertical mowing and lightweight rolling.

Toro Heavy Duty Workman. These vehicles are the dump trucks of the golf course. They have the ability run many attachments. This is our fourth  however two of the older ones (10 and 20 years old) are used exclusively for spraying and topdressing leaving us two heavy duty vehicles for hauling heavy loads as we frequently do.

Toro ProForce Turbine Blower. This is our second turbine blower giving us backup flexibility as well as two to use in the fall for leaf removal. They are controlled remotely by the operator via radio.

New Toro Medium Duty Workman with new Toro greens Roller. This medium duty utility vehicle will replace one of our older ones and this new style roller will be our #1  greens roller while our older roller will become a backup. Up till now we have not had a backup for our greens roller which is huge. 

Greg operating the new Toro greens-roller today on #15 green.

Most of our equipment is equipped with wireless hour meters that communicate with our equipment maintenance program called MyTurf. It's basically a cloud based record keeping platform that automatically produces work orders for our mechanics so we can easily keep up on preventive services.

Thanks as always for your support as without it we wouldn't be able to continually upgrade our all important golf course maintenance equipment.