TURF TALK FROM THE SUPERINTENDENT

Coharie CC Members,

We are going to drain number sixteen green in April so we can continue to ensure its health and playability, as well as use it as a test green to determine if we should drain all of our greens with this technology for their health, but also their puttability, which will naturally allow the ball to roll faster because there will be less surface tension to reduce the roll speed.

Hopefully, one of our next purchases will be a sod cutter that we can have on site to start filling in some very longstanding bare areas of the course. I am not sure when this purchase will come but rest assured that once it does, we will begin to piece meal it together, starting on #16 ingress to the cart path at the end of the fairway. This area is a washout and needs to be rebuilt to withstand rain waters and runoff coupled with funneling cart traffic to the green.

We are borrowing a trailer from a very generous member to carry our aerator throughout the golf course to alleviate compaction, relevel some areas where the grass has been heaved over the years to regrow bare areas, relieve compaction such as #3, #4, #5, ingress areas from the tee boxes where carts have driven without mitigation for years. Those areas are very hard, and water has a difficult time penetrating to the rootzone thus continuing the compaction. Our goal is to relieve that compaction by physically removing the soil from the ground and utilizing those cores to fill in barer areas for growth.

The DR vacuum has been purchased and has already been in use, it works very well. The crux of this process is a dedicated wintertime project and not a mowing season project, although when we have time to use it during the spring/summer, we will capitalize on it.

We have begun the green topdressing plan and will ramp that up as the weather permits. We have weak areas on the back of #3 that we will be pushing hard to grow back in this season and continue to grow in bare areas from July/August 2022.

Mike,