New Dry Area

The picture below shows that we have finally finished up sodding the approach to #9 green.

We got pretty aggressive with this area by removing all the topsoil and digging several trenches down to the gold, gravel layer before backfilling with straight sand.  Needless to say it is very firm here now.  I would say my biggest concern with this spot is keeping it from drying out too much this coming summer.  It is a very exposed area and because it also sees heavy traffic, we spend a lot of time here hand watering in the summer. Of course now it is straight sand to a depth of about 12 inches meaning we should be able to drive down some roots and maybe that will help with turf survival.  

Now we're on to the next area which is in the landing area of the the 11th fairway.  This next picture shows that we have brought in the sand and it has settled enough that we will sod it early next week.

After that we will take on at least one more area.  There are a few to choose from but for me personally, the approach to the 7th green has always been one eyesore that bugs me to death.  It all depends on the quantity of sod we have left at the beginning of #12 fairway.  You can see by the picture below that we have used almost half of the fairway sod here.

What we do next also depends on our labor force.  The leaves are starting to come down at a vicious pace and in twelve days our staff will be reduced by three full time employees for the remainder of the fiscal year. We also have a lot to do on restoring the areas where we removed several trees this past week (a blog is coming about our recent tree removal project very soon).

If you are wondering whats going on in the native areas left of 4, it is directly related to the fore-mentioned drainage projects.  Below is a picture of the area and all this soil is the stuff we removed from the wet, poor draining areas.  Dumping it here gives us the opportunity to use it someday elsewhere if we are ever in need of some fill dirt.  For now we will throw some seed on it and let it go natural.  Soon, you shouldn't really be able to tell we stockpiled soil here.