Aeration Recovery Update

Man oh man, what an ugly spring this is turning out to be.  Unfortunately, it's starting to feel an awful lot like last spring, which was ugly at best.  Oh well though, no point in complaining about the weather in the lower mainland, that accomplishes nothing.

So, as far as aeration recovery goes, we are quite pleased with where we're at.  Despite the cool and wet weather, the greens are healing very nicely.  We dropped mowing heights down a bit today and will continue to step them down to our normal height-of-cut over the next couple weeks.  Here is how they look after today's mowing:

recovery on greens 1 week following aeration

The greens will remain a bit bumpy as they recover and in a large part due to the poa annua seedhead.  Yes, it's that time of year again for our poa annua to produce seedhead as it does twice per year, once in the spring and again in the fall.  This seedhead is quite prolific for about 2 weeks and then tends to become less and less apparent.  I wrote a blog last year post that explains in further detail about this seedhead production that can be found here: http://qgolfclub.blogspot.ca/2011/05/its-that-time-of-yearthe-dreaded-poa.html  We anticipate the greens to continue to recover well, especially if we get some warmer, drier and sunnier weather.

We pulled larger cores on the tees so they are not healing quite as quickly as the greens, but they are recovering well.  We are already seeing some new turf establishing on the tees as a result of the heavy overseeding we completed on them during aeration.  They should fill in nicely as the new grass plants establish and improve the overall density of the teeing surface.

The fairways are also recovering nicely from aeration.  It's been a bit of a struggle getting them as clean as we'd like following coring, but they are improving more and more with each mowing.  What we really need for them to improve even quicker is some consistently dry weather.  That being said, we are pleased with the progress on them and we will continue to work on cleaning them up as they recover.

The rough throughout the course is still very wet from all the rain we've been receiving so the cleanup process has been difficult to say the least.  We are doing everything we can to cleanup the smashed cores that were blown off the fairways.  This is a slow process and we ask for your patience as we continue to work at it.  Much like the situation on the fairways, consistently dry weather would help us out immensely!

As you can see below, the forecast is promising.  I've got my fingers crossed that it holds true!

It's nice to see temperatures heading in the right direction!