The staff and I continue to move forward with preparations for next year, the fall is a great time to focus on practices that will enhance the turf for next season. The cooler temperatures and the shorter days have transitioned the Zoysia Grass fairways to dormancy slightly faster than past years. Zoysia Grass when dormant, exhibits poor recuperative capacity from cart traffic because of its slow growth.
In order to prepare the Zoysia Grass for the winter months we employ various strategies:
- Raising mowing heights
- Vertical slicing of fairways
- Herbicide applications to remove annual grassy weeds (Annual Bluegrass) to reduce competition
- Restricting carts to the path
Textbook winter injury to Zoysia Grass occurs in shaded, wet and high concentrated cart traffic areas. Leaf clean-up season is ramping up you will see our team mindfully traversing the fairways to remove the leaves. With the cooler temperatures, frost delays are inevitable, tee times will be pushed back the length of the delays. Email notifications will be sent to the membership indicating a delay along with the start time. It is always difficult to anticipate in advance of a frost just how long the delay will be.
With almost 3 weeks since the putting green aerfication the greens are doing well and the team has moved on to the aerification of the rough areas. This process commenced early this week and we will continue while weather and soil conditions permit. This practice is beneficial to the turfgrass plant to remove compaction in the soil from the amount of play (cart traffic) observed this year. Overall, it will have a limited impact on playability as noted in the pictures below.
With the final mowings of the High Rough "Native Areas" our staff is making fall herbicide applications to roughly 25 acres of steep terrain, this will take roughly two weeks.
As always, please pass along feedback or questions to grounds@hydeparkcc.com.
Thank-you,
Pat O'Brien
Grounds Superintendent
