Llanerch Golf Course and External Activities

As most of you know, we have been very busy with tournaments over the last 7 days. We were able to have a successful Member-Member Championship last Friday and Saturday despite the rain. We had to get right back at prepping the course for the PGA Section Championship that started with a Pro-Amateur on Monday followed by three days of stroke play. Today marks the final round. I very happy to say that many participates have told me how much they love the course and the new clubhouse. It has been just a great event and Llanerch members should be very proud of their club!

We have finished aerifying fairways today.  We have some topdressing still to do on approaches and need to add some more fertilizer on greens tomorrow. That being all said, we are ahead of schedule enough that we are opening tomorrow at 11:00am with carts. Thanks for your patience.

Any Golf Course Superintendent will tell you they prefer to aerify when its warm and dry. Well, today is very very dry! It puts in a position where we have to use more water than normal. As for warm....well its warm plus plus! We are already 88 degrees and approaching 90 before the end of the afternoon. We just have to adjust the amount of sand we use. So far, everything is going as planned. We will open the practice putting greens tomorrow. The range and practice are open today.

We started aerifying greens today. The holes are about "medium" in size. Over today and tomorrow, we will roll, topdress and broom the greens. Are goal is to fill in as many holes as possible to the surface. The more we can do that, the fast the greens heal. Tomorrow, we are slated to start aerifying the tees and approaches.

Where is Summer? It is crazy to see such low temperatures over the weekend. I was looking at last year's temperature records and notice that this time last year we were 7 degrees hotter! That might not sound like much but in agricultural terms, that is huge difference. Today, we are fertilizing the greens to promote some growth before aerification next Tuesday. We are aerifying greens next Tuesday, fairways on Wednesday, tees and approaches on Thursday. This schedule will be all dependent on the weather and could change very quickly.

As of yesterday, we opened the range tee where we had planted bermuda grass! It is still a little "young" but has strong roots. We will be filling the divots with a sand mixture only. We do not use any kind of seed in the divot mixture. This is because bermuda grass grows vegetatively and will "spread" from the edges of the divot to heal. I hope everyone enjoys the playability of the new surface!

As you are playing the golf course, you might notice some of the native areas have been cut down. On holes 1,8,16 and 14 we started to prep the areas for applications of a herbicide. The herbicide will reduce the invasive common bermuda that has taken over in some spots. We made these same applications last year with some success. We feel that it might a couple more years of this program to eradicate it.