Last Minute Tweaking

#11 tee last Friday

#11 tee yesterday.  As you can see this warm wet weather has been good for growing in the new tees.  The young swards are filling in nicely and we are just a little over two weeks away from playing the course from the new back tees at a total yardage of 6910 yards.  This new tee on #11 is really cool as it is tucked deep under an old oak grove.

The new teeing ground on 16 is also looking great.  If you don't like the pole in the tee then you don't like the pole in the tee.  I love the pole in the tee and this is going to be a fun tee shot.  This whole area is neat as directly to the left of this photo you can see how the tee is connected to the run off area of #12 green.  Here's a look at that.

Below you can see how the new 7th tee is connected to the 17th tee.  This teeing ground is going to create some interesting interaction between players as they tee off next to each other going different directions.

 And of course on #18 you run into the same situation on the now 565 yard home hole.  This teeing ground is  over an acre in size and shared by the sixth hole.  Below is how the shot looks from #18.

And below is how the teeing ground looks from #6.

You can see that this warm, wet stretch of weather has brought up all the overseeding, and we now have total coverage of baby grass plants, even in those areas where we struggled after the historic heat stretch during early May.  Below is how the young sward looks up close.

We are five weeks out now after our initial seeding of this ground and we have been applying fertilizer every 7 days to get this grass growing rapidly.  Now we just need to mow, mow, mow as this will stimulate tillering and thus increase density.  The anticipation of playing the new tees is growing around the membership as now with grass on them, they are looking like tees.  The 15 day forecast is for sunny weather so we will have a great chance to get them good and ready for US Open field day on the 15th.  Jeremy is doing his part to increase the excitement building around the Club.

The flowers have been delivered and he's been planting like crazy lately.  This is that new area by the main patio.

And you can see that at the main putting green, things are looking really good with his new arrangement.  I'm not sure exactly what's in here but you can bet I will devote a future blog to pointing out exactly what Jeremy has selected for this years show of color. 

And yes the hanging baskets are in and each one is customized with material that will work best in their individual micro-climates.   

You may have noticed some last minute tweaking of the mowing lines on the course.  Here you can see we took some of that nice poa turf off of #8...........and used it to replace some scalped ryegrass elsewhere that wasn't so great.

Here we are replacing that with some ryegrass rough.  The mowing line here is much improved now.

In some other areas the tweaking was mostly just an exchange of sod like here on 14 approach.  What you see above is how things looked as a result of moving some bunkers around.  So we went in with the sod cutter and moved some turf around so it looks appropriate with the new bunker configuration.  

And this is how it turned out.  We have been doing this kind of work in many areas around the new bunkers, and to be honest, this kind of stuff will go on for a very long time before we're happy.  But right now, the rest of it will have to wait till next winter and the winter after that.  The weather is turning back to awesome, and the tournament season is under way.  It's now about golf.................... so get out there and enjoy it.