Now that fall is here we are adjusting our focus away from routine maintenance and attempting to prepare the course for next spring. As far as players are concerned the most obvious activity occurring throughout the course is all the aeration.
Normally, tees are aerated early summer but, and I'll be whining about this a fair amount as I review our year in future posts, staffing levels made it difficult to keep up with basic mowing let alone a high input activity such as aerating. Cooler nights and increasing H.O.C 's has shifted labour away from cutting grass and freed up man power for aerating. Equipment failures are sabotaging our efforts but we're plugging along (no pun intended!).
A huge, messy job for the crew is aerating fairways. We use 2 sometimes 3 guys to operate 4 pieces of equipment in a process that takes close to 10 days. The clean-up process is what takes the time. Throw in play and you can easily triple the amount time needed to complete an average sized fairway. So why do it now and not when we're closed? Mostly because of time and staffing (if you type the phrase "fall activities" in the little search window located on the upper left corner of the web page any post highlighting the issues associated with fall prep/maintenance will appear for your reading pleasure or better yet click the blue highlighted "fall activities" located in the bottom left of this post and all posts will that lable will appear). A somewhat irregular request I would ask of you as a member is while we're out there aerating a particular hole why not pick up and take a par and move on to the next hole? The quicker we're done the quicker we're out of your hair!
