Granite Bay Fall 2020 Aeration

The fall equinox is only 22 days away and Labor Day is only a week away. This marks the traditional time of the year for Granite Bay's course aeration and the time of the year that our cool season turf will start to recover from the Summer. 

#12 Green Surround aerated and topdressed last week.

Last week aerated the Santa Anna hybrid bermuda surrounds and are doing the same to the #17 fairway this morning Monday 8/31/20 before a 10:00 event. The rush on aerating these areas prior to the greens and other cool season turf  is to capture as much warm weather that is left in the year for recovery of the warm season Santa Anna. This highlights some of the difficult maintenance strategies we are currently balancing with our mix of turf which hopefully will not be long term. 

#17 Fairway Santa Anna Hybrid Bermuda aeration in process

The past two aeration cycles we have minimized and eliminated some aeration cultural practices in anticipation of a major turf renovation project. And even through we made it through the summer of 2020 in better condition then  past summers, the course needs an aeration. Sooner or later we will finish what we started as far as renovation is concerned but until then we have to take care of what we have and aeration unfortunately is a part of overall turf care and conditioning. Therefore we will get started with 2020 fall aeration directly after Labor Day. The below schedule is what we will be doing this fall. 

2020 Granite Bay Golf Club Fall Aeration Schedule

Mon 9/7/20 - Labor Day. Club Open

Tue 9/8/20 - Course Closed. GCM Aerating Putting Surfaces

Wed 9/9/20 - Course Closed. GCM Aerating, Seeding & Topdressing FW's & Rough

Thu 9/10/20 - Course Closed. GCM Aerating, Seeding & Topdressing FW's & Rough

Fri 9/11/20 - Sunday 9/13/20 - Course Open - Cart Path Only

Mon 9/14/20 - Course Closed GCM Aerating, Seeding & Topdressing Tees

Tue 9/15/20 - Sunday 9/20/20  Course Open - Cart Path Only

Mon 9/21/20 -  Course Closed GCM Aeration Loose Ends.

Tue 9/22/20 - Course Open Carts Status TBD

2020 Summer Course Update

2020 has been quite year so far and I'm  not sure many of us anticipated how much our lives would change. In some ways our work lives in Granite Bay GCM hasn't changed drastically as the golf course never completely closed due to COVID and actually before all this pandemic stuff we thought we would be closed to finish the turf conversion we started in 2019.  Then "The Project" was cancelled followed shortly after with COVID shutdown's and all of our worlds changed.

#2 FW low shady area. Stays wet, collects golf balls and without
Member divot filling help is pretty tore up in early August.

In many ways the cancelling of the project was fortuitous for the GBGC membership as you now had somewhere to go and exercise and socialize in a socially distant fashion, so the golf course has never been busier. To give you an idea of how busy, through July 2020 we have run 26,000 golf rounds through the course. All  of which were Member rounds. In the entire year of 2019 we ran 29,000 rounds including both Member  and Tournament rounds. Most of these rounds were done without the help of Members filling divots because we were required to remove all of the divot bottles from the golf course and single cart riders because we cannot send out carts with dual occupancy. 

#1 Granite Tee. It got wore out early in the 2020 season and needed
to be re-sodded. 

All this activity didn't leave as much of a mark on the course early in the spring months as the course's cool season turf is thriving at that time of the year. But as we progressed into the summer months where the course has historically struggled, the traffic is starting to take its toll. GCM has more then doubled its man-hours on filling divots but it is hard to keep up. Additionally we are trying to culture new hybrid bermuda surrounds and #17 FW to help create the playing surfaces we all want at the same time taking care of a cool season course in another Granite Bay summer while receiving historic traffic. Something had to give and the course is certainly summer worn in areas in early August. Weather hasn't been to bad even after recording 15 days over 100 degrees and another 15 days in the 98+ degree range. Nighttime temperatures have been cool and the two distinct heat spells have been proceeded by nice cool downs.

Newly installed tee-line at the rear of the driving range was
a traffic related add in the social distancing world we now live in.

View from the back of the range on the new tee-line

None of us know when we will get back to normal. We do know that the fall equinox is 46 days away and post labor day aeration is only a month away. Let the recovery begin!