It’s been a busy 11 days since the course enhancement
project began at Old Chatham. The
project is running on time and the construction team is very happy with our
progress. The ‘team’ assembled for this
project are the golf course architectural firm of Rees Jones and Sr. Vice
President Greg Muirhead, Shapemasters, a
golf course building company based out of Southport and your golf operations and
course maintenance staffs. The ‘team’
was involved with the original construction of Old Chatham and it’s proving a
real asset to have a group of people so very familiar with our golf course.
What to expect when you’re
expecting…
When you have a strong design for a golf course as Old
Chatham does, the art of pulling off a great renovation and redesign hinges
upon integration of new design features into preexisting concepts that are
already enjoying great success. To that
end, we’ve “hit it out of the park” so far and I hope you all can attend the
member event on Friday July 6 at 6pm to see a preview for yourself. Rees Jones himself will be here to talk to
the members in attendance. If you would
like to see a preview of the work that’s been done, or you merely want to ask
Rees about what he did to Medinah in preparation for this year’s Ryder Cup it
should be a good evening for all and a chance to do both.
The nuts and bolts of
the work…
Act I: Death of a 12
year old…
The first stage in a conversion to the newer Ultradwarf
bermudagrasses involves eradicating the grass that lived on the former putting
surfaces. To achieve this we treated the
greens and the surrounds with a non-selective herbicide. As the herbicide is non-selective in nature,
we have to take great care to insure it only ends up where we want it. The process actually began on the front nine
as the final putts were being made in this year’s spring member guest invitational.
It takes about 1 week for the herbicide to translocate throughout the plant and do its job of killing off the undesirable turf species and when we closed on June 18, we were ready to begin the next part of our process.
Act II: Scalp it a
little, verticut it a lot… Rinse and Repeat, Rinse and Repeat, Rinse and Repeat
(you get the picture)
The Ultradwarf bermudagrasses love growing through old dead
Bentgrass provided they have some soil to come in contact with for
rooting. In order to preserve the shapes
of our greens, we aggressively mowed and scalped the greens, verticut them,
mowed and scalped again, verticut again, and continued until we lost count. This part of the process allows us to remove
leaf tissue from the former plants to make way for the improved varieties we
will be planting.
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| Mow and Scalp |
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| Vertical Mowing |
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| More Vertical Mowing |
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| Mowing and Scalping |
Act III: Aerate a lot, drag it all in and eat a lot of dust in the process….
After all the mowing, scalping, and verticutting we aerate
all the greens 2 times and drag in all the cores with a steel drag mat. This will provide good aeration for our new
plants when they begin to grow and dragging in the cores allow us to keep the
desirable soil that comes off the plugs on the green.
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| Aerating |
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| Dragging Cores |
Act IV: Where did all
the green color go?
Finally after 5 days of intensive preparation, all the
greens look more like dirt and less like a green. They still have their contours in place (the
greens were not enhancing with contour changes that is) but they are an
excellent “bed” for our sprigs which will be arriving on July 10.
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| Close Up of Green and New Sprig Bed |
Act V: To be
continued…
As you can see we’ve done a lot in the first week and a half
and we hope you will continue to follow us on the Old Chatham Blog. Oh, and we did manage to squeeze in mowing
all the fairways twice (the grass still grows), mowing the rough one time,
mowing the tees once, setting up the range daily, aerated all the fairways,
aerated all the tees, aerated all the approaches, and top-dressed fairways,
tees, and approaches as well.
A few early statistics:
700 Tons of sand used
50 People average working daily
5 Days of 100+ degree weather forecast
9 Tons of sand per green used just to level the areas
for the new collars alone
2 Visits by past president of the American Society of Golf
Course Architects and Senior Vice President of Rees Jones Inc Greg Muirhead to offer
onsite feedback
61 Number of Miles I drove never leaving the golf course on
Monday approving changes and redirecting staff as progress required (1 lap
around the cartpaths at Old Chatham is about 4.5 miles)
What next?
July 6th, a member gathering and cookout at
6pm.
On July 10, the greens will be planted with Champion
Ultradwarf Bermudagrass.
Construction on the new bunkers will pick up speed as July
progresses.
Grassing of the new collars will occur around July 4th.
Grassing of the 2nd, 7th, and 12th
fairways to one homogenous grass variety will begin near the end of this week.
Best wishes,
Brian Powell, CGCS
