Intros, Updates, and Looking Ahead
Spring has sprung at East Lake! We are working "fill steam ahead" towards warmer temperatures and summer schedules. With this being my first blog post I wanted to take a moment to reintroduce myself as the new moderator of the East Lake Agronomy Blog.
Intros
I @JasonLTharp have been at East Lake a little over a year now. A more indepth bio is available in a previous post here. One interesting fact: My first golf course job was at The Governor's Club in Brentwood, Tn, Shaune's new post as Superintendent. It is a small world after all! @govclubsuper is his new twitter handle BTW. Follow both of us for a constant feed of interesting happenings at our courses!
Over the course of the coming years I am looking forward to the challenge of letting all of you in behind the curtain of our Agronomy Department. My highest goal is to consistantly add valuble information and commentary to the conversation of current golf course maintenance.
Updates
Once massive project we recelty completed was the replacement of the subsurface vault which encloses our Chipping Green Subair system. The walls of the vault had become comprimised, allowing the weight from above to begin collapsing.
Fairways and greens have greened up! We are ecstatic with the condition of our greens coming out of winter, they are dense and strong! It is shaping up to be a fantastic year at East Lake Golf Club!
Intros
I @JasonLTharp have been at East Lake a little over a year now. A more indepth bio is available in a previous post here. One interesting fact: My first golf course job was at The Governor's Club in Brentwood, Tn, Shaune's new post as Superintendent. It is a small world after all! @govclubsuper is his new twitter handle BTW. Follow both of us for a constant feed of interesting happenings at our courses!
Over the course of the coming years I am looking forward to the challenge of letting all of you in behind the curtain of our Agronomy Department. My highest goal is to consistantly add valuble information and commentary to the conversation of current golf course maintenance.
Updates
Once massive project we recelty completed was the replacement of the subsurface vault which encloses our Chipping Green Subair system. The walls of the vault had become comprimised, allowing the weight from above to begin collapsing.
You can see here the old vault with all of the connections removed, ready to be pulled out.
I don't want to even imagine doing this without heavy machinery......
The new vault is an improved model from Subair, but required extensive rerouting of external connections. Here you see the new vault being alined with the old damper (which directs air flow into either vacuum or pressure mode).
In all, this project required 121.5 man hours from out team, needless to say we are glad it is done! Special thanks goes out to Howard @hhornetech and Chris our mechanics, and Lopez our irrigation tech! Great job guys!
Verticutting!!!
Over the course of the last two weeks we have lightly verticut everything from tees to collars and approaches. After a few tests, we set the verticutters to -.100 and went at it! Each area was treated as it's own, determining the number of cuts (between 1 and 4) according to turf type, organic accumulation, and canopy density. We changed direction after every cut and followed it with a thorough blow and double cut with a John Deere SL220 with an out-front brush. We are very excited with the result. The shallow verticutting into buckets removed tremendous amounts of organic deposits, and left a firm dense canopy that is ready for play!
Looking Ahead
Spring has sprung!
-Jason
