What's that smell?

When we aerify fairways, we generate mountains of plugs.  Here's the pile behind 7 green.  We have about 5 sites on the property right now where we are stockpiling these plugs.  When we're done aerifying, we'll have to spend many hours trucking these plugs around the property in order to get rid of the stockpiles.  In the picture below you can see an ideal spot to get rid of these plugs.  This is an area where there is very little topsoil, so you can see rocks, and roots exposed.  Obviously this is not a very good area for your ball to land.  Taking a shot from an area like this can break your golf club, or break your wrist. 

So now in this next picture, you can see we have distributed plugs around the base of some trees in order to cover these rocks and roots with something that would be just fine to hit your shot from.  After we put the plugs on these areas, we throw down some seed so it eventually becomes turf.  Another benefit of doing this is that now this is also an area we can mow.  Before, with rocks and roots exposed, mowing here could obviously cause damage to my mowers, and dull the cutting blades.

Although there are countless areas to get rid of these plugs, there is a significant amount of labor involved with this method. That is why this week we took advantage of the dry weather and spread the plugs with our fairway sand topdresser out on to some of the roughs.  Specifically, we spread plugs over the area where the sewer pipe was installed along the east property line.  Below is a picture of Doug spreading plugs on the left of the 4th hole.

Following the restoration of the sewer project, many rocks were at the surface in that area so spreading plugs here will help build up some cover over those rocks.  Mainly, it was a great way to recycle our plugs back onto the property, and it was fast and easy to get rid of them by spreading them with the machine.  Getting rid of these plug piles over the next couple weeks takes a lot of time so the opportunity was there and we took advantage of it.  Anyway, that is why it kind of smelled bad over there this week.  Those plug piles composted a little bit even though they were only piled for a day or two.