Week of October 16th: Start of Fall Cleanup
- Michael Curtin
- Oct 20, 2023
- 2 min read
There has been a few beautiful sunrises over the course the last week as shown above. The focus of the agronomy team this week was on finishing a few planned agronomic practices while also starting to shift our attention to fall cleanup. Unfortunately this weekend is looking to be a bad in terms of weather conditions. Over an inch of rain is expected Saturday with wind speeds reaching 20 mph during the night and continuing into Sunday. These weather conditions will result in the course being in need of a large amount of cleanup by the start of next week. That amount of rain and resulting wet conditions will also prevent us from utilizing our larger turbine blowers reducing the crew to the use of backpack blowers. The same conditions that restrict the membership to cart path only will also slow our cleanup efforts considerably.
Leaf Cleanup:
Its that time of year again when much of the maintenance teams time during the day will be spent blowing and picking up leaves and other tree debris. To that end the leaf box was once again installed onto one of our utility carts and the leaf vacuum dragged out from the back of the warehouse. The leaf vacuum has been a huge help with fall/spring cleanup here at Ipswich since we first acquired it a few seasons ago.
We have also begun to use one of our newer pieces of equipment, the Harper Hawk. The Harper Hawk is a ride on leaf vacuum/sweeper that should prove useful with cleaning up the rough. We are still fiddling with some adjustment settings and figuring out the best way to fit this machine into our cleanup efforts.
Approach Aeration:
As mentioned last week approach's were aerated using a 3/4" solid tine before being top-dressed with sand. After letting the sand dry a drag brush was pulled over the approaches to help brush the sand into the aeration holes and into the canopy of the turf.
The step cut of rough along the beginning of the 15th fairway was also aerated and top-dressed using some of the compost that will be used on the range floor shortly. This section of step cut was sodded at the end of last season. The compost will help improve the soil composition of the area and provide better growing conditions.
Other Tasks Completed:
Tees sprayed with fertility, fungicide, and growth regulator.
New nozzles for our greens sprayer. Same kind previously used but nozzles can wear over time and heavy use.
Grub treatment (Dylox) applied to a number of areas in the rough. Very soon as temperatures fall the grubs present in the soil will burrow down deep into the soil. At that point applying products like Dylox will be pointless.
Certain areas of greens were topdressed prior to the rain.
