Leaf Cleanup

The leaves have been falling for a couple weeks, and we are well underway with cleanup.  This is a large undertaking here at Swope because of how many trees we have.  Our main mode of removal is through the use of blowers.  We have two pull behind buffalo blowers that we can maneuver around trees with ease.  We also have a larger tractor mounted blower that we save for the larger areas.  For the most part, we corral the leaves across the rough and fairway until we get them to the trees where we blow them as far into as possible.  In areas where a tree line is not practical, we use our large rough unit to mulch the leaves as much as possible and then blow them again to disperse through the rough.  We will continue to blow and mulch leaves for another few weeks until most all of them have dropped.

Verticutting

We recently completed verticutting the greens for the second time in two weeks.  This is a great cultural practice to remove thatch from the top layer of the greens.  It promotes a more upright growth of the turf which will provide a cleaner cut with the mowers.  This will help in ball roll speed as well.  There is little negative impact to immediate playability of the greens.  We will also add a light sand topdressing after we are finished.  I hope to get one more verticutting in before temperatures really start to dive down. 

Blowing off any excess clippings not collected by the mower.

Close-up of green after verticutting.


 

Fall Overseeding

The warm and dry summer left us with many bare areas on the golf course.  Areas that received no irrigation were hit the hardest.  Thankfully, we are able to utilize a tractor mounted slit seeder that does a really good job.  In total, we planted about 2000 pounds of seed in the rough.  We are fairly happy with the results even though the fall has been rather dry. 

We also used a couple seed mats in a few places on #14.  These mats help hold moisture so the germinating seed does not dry out.  This is the way to go when seeding bare areas.  These are pictures from right of the fairway and right of the new grass bunker by the green.