Native Areas

As you might have noticed, over the past week the native areas were mowed down with a bushhog. I just wanted to let everyone know that these areas will not be going away, rather this is just routine maintenance. The native areas, while allowed to grow freely, still require yearly maintenance in order to achieve the best possible appearance. These areas will be mowed twice a year in order to promote new growth. The mowing schedule will be once in the Fall and once in the Spring. In addition, they will be fertilized and a pre-emergent herbicide will be applied in the Spring annually in order to reduce the weed population. I hope this explains the process completely and there isn't any confusion as to why we were cutting them down.

Preparing for winter

The decision was made to remove the intermediate cut during the winter months. The reasoning behind this decision was because the height of cuts would be almost identical between the fairway and intermediate cut in the winter. The height of cut for the fairways will be raised before the first frost in order to provide more plant material for the bermudagrass to survive dormancy. There would have only been a 1/4" difference between the fairways and intermediate cut so I decided to include the intermediate cut into the fairway. The only other option was to expand the 2" rough and I didn't think this would be fair. The scalped turf will look unsightly for a few days but will blend in with the fairway cut very soon. This area will be included when we paint the fairways on #1, 8, and 18. We will also paint the fairways on #7 and 9 but since they are par 3's, they don't have an intermediate cut. Only having two heights of cut during the winter months will provide dramatic definition to the golf course.