Light Aerification on the Greens of the Dye Course

This coming Wednesday, March 27th, the Dye Course will be performing a light aerification to the greens, during its regular weekly closure.  As discussed in an earlier post, the benefits of doing this procedure truly outweighs the immediate minimal disruption that follows.  A light topdressing, mowing, and rolling will follow to minimize the disruption and play should not be adversely affected.  The solid tines being used for this procedure are approximately .20” in diameter and will not bring soil to the surface like a conventional coring tine and cleanup is minimal. 

Spring Pre-Emergent Application on the Dye Course

During the course closure on Wednesday March 13^TH, the Agronomy Team was able to get out and apply a granular pre-emergent herbicide on a fertilizer carrier to all of the fairways, approaches, and 419 Bermudagrass roughs.  Oxidiazon or Ronstar was the tool of choice for control of summer annual weeds such as crabgrass, goose grass, and many of the other summer weeds that we battle here in the lowcountry.   This application was carried out by the team over the course of the day and is an integral part of our weed control strategy, so application is very important to make sure there are no misses or over applied areas that could result in either poor weed control or damage from to much herbicide.  This application needs to be watered in heavily to move the herbicide off of the fertilizer carrier and activate it into soil profile, therefore we watered heavily immediately after the application and again heavily the night of the application.  Tuesday the day prior to application we received approximately a ¼” of rain which already had the course in a damp condition.  With the watering of the herbicide on Wednesday, conditions on Thursday may be a little more damp than we would like but the timing of this application is crucial based on soil temperature and we are at the end of the window for application. Play should be affected minimally and the course will dry down and be firm again by the weekend.

Michigan State University Collegiate Tournament

Colleton River hosted the Michigan State University Collegiate Tournament on March 6^th and 7^th.  Four schools traveled from the Midwest during their spring break to match their best against the challenging Pete Dye course. Thirty six holes were to be played on Wednesday, and eighteen more scheduled for Thursday; however the bitter cold 36 mile per hour gusting winds only allowed for eighteen holes to be completed on Wednesday. Thursday turned out to be a much better golfing day with a big congratulations going out to Matthew Moseley, of Michigan State University, with the lowest individual score at 228. Penn State University came away with the best team score of 916. We look forward to hosting this again in the future for the next Collegiate Event. 

Wednesday's Wind Storms

Due to the high winds today, silt fence has been installed in areas where the sand typically blows out of the dunes and some bunkers.  This is to help contain the sand to those areas.  We, also, will run water on the dunes and bunkers to help stabilize the sand.   This picture is of #16 on the Nicklaus course showing the amount of sand that blows out during a typical windy day when the wind is blowing from the west.  We will blow the sand back into the bunker and clean the area with a water hose once the wind has settled.

Lagoon Repairs on #8 of the Nicklaus Course

The Lagoon on the right side of #8 of the Nicklaus Course has been repaired.  There is "touch-up" work that still needs to be completed with the sod, however we will do that when we are sodding the lagoon banks on the left side.  We are currently lowering the lagoon on the left side of #8 over this weekend to reach the desired level of three feet below the top of the liner.  We will take the same steps to repair this lagoon as we did for the one on the right side and expect the repair should be completed in the next two weeks, weather permitting.  

Hydraulic leak on #6 green of the Nicklaus Course

As luck would have it, the greens aerifier blew a hydraulic line on the first green of aerification Monday morning.  The good news is the operator quickly noticed the problem and was able to move the aerifier off the green before too much damage was done.  

We have put several practices in place to reduce the amount of damage to the green and can now only monitor the situation.  If the area begins to disrupt play or we feel we will not be able to grow in the turf in a reasonable amount of time, we will then take additional steps.

February Rains!

We have received more than 10 inches of rain during the month of February here at Colleton River Plantation, causing our golf courses to be much wetter than normal.  While our lagoon levels are getting back to normal and we are catching up on the shortages of rainfall that we have experienced over the past year, it does cause a few issues.  

The Nicklaus Course was closed on Monday and Tuesday, February 25-26 for a "mini-aerification".  Because we have received 2.4 inches of rain over the past 48 hours, we were able to aerify the greens with a quarter inch solid tine, however we were not able to topdress the greens and do some of the other normal practices we wanted to complete during this closure.  Therefore, the greens will have small holes that will be visible but should putt fine.  We will topdress and roll the greens throughout the week with as little disruption to play as possible.  In addition, we will be repairing the washed edges of the bunkers, as seen in the picture below and scraping the bottoms from silt washing into them.