January 2018,

We hope everyone enjoyed their holidays. With the colder temperatures, finally here the growth of the grass has been slowing down. This has allowed us to get some tasks and projects done in other areas of the course.

The week of January 8^th the greens and grounds department spent the week checking all bunkers depths in the greenside bunkers. Water, wind, daily maintenence, and play can move the sand over time. G&G staff checked all depths in the bottoms and faces and will re-distribute as necessary. We go through great lengths to make sure the faces have the proper amount of sand for balls to bounce back to the bottom. We also check the depths of the bunkers in bottoms to ensure consistent depth relative to the liner. While checking depths and redistributing the sand we use aggressive hand rakes to loosen and flip the sand. This will help to reduce the harden packed sand that can develop about an inch down due to the daily hand raking. To reduce the potential of damaging the liner we do not use a motorized sand rake in the greenside bunkers.

The week of January 15^th the fairway bunkers were also checked. We can bring the motor sand rake into the fairway bunkers to push and cultivate the sand. Due to the fairway bunkers having older sand we do use the motorized sand rake 1x per week to help cultivate the sand.

We recently made some changes to the north driving range tee. The sod in the corner of the tee next to the half-way house was removed and replaced with pavers. This area was difficult to grow healthy turf due to the excess traffic and shade from the half-way house roof.

Vegetation is being added to the retention area between the 10^th tee and fairway. This will help to hide the retention and soften view from the tee and the practice green area. In addition, we hope the addition vegetation will help with erosion control. Unfortunately, only some of the desired plants were available at this time of year. There will be some additional plantings in the area in few weeks 

when the remainder of the plant stock is available.

With the temperatures finally cooling in December and January the pressure from the Bermuda on the overseeded ryegrass has subsided. This has allowed to lower heights on the overseeded surfaces on several occasions to provide smoother, firmer, and faster playing surfaces. As we move to the spring tournament season. we will continue tighten heights. This has also allowed us to reduce the irrigation dramatically.

Pavers extension at half way house

 Plants and irrigation being installed on #10 tee retention 

 More plants and irrigation on #10

Great striping from the new heights.