May 15th Update | West Hills Golf

West Hills

Fredericton

Hey Folks,

As Brett mentioned in his email we will be opening the golf course on the 21st of May.

We still have eight greens in repair mode. The number of temporary greens are undetermined at this point as we expect the weather this weekend to be much improved. With the help of the mats and tarps are seeing a significant germination on the greens, but the seed is very slow moving, mainly due to cooler weather for most of the recent days.

As an example here is the front of 12 green. While the middle valley was decimated, the front has these small areas of damage. This picture was taken on Tuesday of this week and the injured areas are beginning to close in. The more they close in, the less likely the green will be temped.

Within those areas on 12 there are many small seedlings finally sprouting. They are quite small and fragile, so as you can imagine foot traffic would set the recovery back.

Our hopes are that the upcoming weather next week will remain as predicted and perfect for growing. Hopefully they areas will close in and we can open more greens, but we’ll have to make that decision later.

Yesterday we applied fungicide to all of the greens. Between the warmer weather, the amount of water we are applying and the amount of fertilizer we have on the course, the environment is perfect for fungus to grow on the seedlings.

Today we applied a very light liquid fertilizer to spur the seedlings on over the weekend.

This is under the tarp on three green on Wednesday. As you can see we have a pretty good catch of seedlings and they are progressing, albeit slowly. I expect to see a great improvement over the next week.

This week we dedicated two days to over seeding the weak areas on the fairways other than 18 and 16. Here’s Dennis running the home made seed we created.

The seeder slices about a half inch deep and make a nice receptacle for over seeding. We’ve held off on this till this week mainly because at such a large scale, we want the best catch possible. With over 600 pounds of seed going out, we want the highest level of efficacy timed with the earliest possible date.

This weekend is supposed to be very nice, with weather in the mid twenty’s. We will be watering the course quite a-bit during the day so if you’re out for a walk, please take care around the green and tees.

Here’s the over head comparison on three for this week.