End of May Update

We last left off on phase 2 with sodding of 3 tee underway. We are happy to say that this has been completed. The turf was quick to knit into the soil and we have already begun the process of cutting the turf down to tee height. As we saw with the range tee a couple years ago, this is a process that requires a certain amount of patience. As the bluegrass gets cut down, we will be completing cultural practices that will help level the turf through topdressing and incorporating ryegrass and bentgrass; types of turf that thrive under low heights of cut. Frequent fertilizer applications will be made to give the turf strength and with our mowing schedule will give the plants energy to grow horizontally; creating a tight surface to hit off of. Our goal is to open the tee in the summer. Weather will play a role in all of this. The rainy summer we had in 2023 kept us off the tee deck for the full season. I don’t anticipate 800mm of rain this summer….stranger things have happened.

All that is left for our contractor to complete is repairing the damage done getting to and from the worksites. A necessary evil as part of the renovation process as we would be much further behind in our week and would have suffered extensive delays in progress with some of the wet conditions we experienced this spring. Extensive repair work was done on cart path edges on 3 and the paths to and from the fairway bunkers on 1 and 9 are being sodded as this post is being created. The extra investment in capital to get the fit and finish look is well worth it, in my estimation. It is a difficult endeavor for our crew to complete while we are maintaining the course during the peak season, as seen in Phase 1. We anticipate the crew wrapping things up this week. All that will be left for them will be to install the sand in the bunkers they built. This will take place approximately in the second half of June.

We are close to being ready to put sand into the bunkers built in-house last fall. Round up has been sprayed in the bunker floors. Our intention was to start installing the sand this week. Wet conditions have changed our week, and we have been spending most of the rest of it playing catchup on mowing. That and some areas still quite wet we will postpone this until next week.

We are just about ready to open the range tee for the season. We completed an aeration this past week (along with all of the tees on course). A topdressing and overseeding will be completed Friday and we will open the tee next week. Reminder to use proper divot patterns. The better care we take of it the more we can keep it open. We will close the tee from time to time to ensure we have adequate space throughout the entirety of the season. During the year we fill divots on the tee at least on a weekly basis. The hope is that by the time we have moved through the tee deck that we can go back to the first position where all divots would have filled in. We were successful last year in its first full season of use.

Tee Aeration completed. More cultural practices to come