Day to Day Duties

Some normal happenings going on this week at Glen Echo. We brought one additional crew member back this week and will begin to increase our staffing over the next couple of weeks.

I'm still fooling with the format of this blog. I appreciate your patience in case something is not quite in alignment. Photographic memory is not a part of my repertoire. I have to practice a few times before perfection can take its proper place.

Some areas of our greens did not get the holes filled all the way to the top as we normally do when we aerated our greens last week. All of our staff members worked this week at adding some additional sand to a number of greens to insure that a majority of the holes were filled to the top. We will be doing some additional lighter topdressings in the next week in an effort to improve ball roll and smoothness.

The picture below is a part of the sanding process that took place. We used our standard topdresser to place the material on the green. In this case, 14 green was in need of more sand-than I would have liked to have seen. The guys are using back pack blowers to help with blowing the sand in the holes as well as brooms. Greens were rolled and were then cut the next day.

The never ending work of tree litter pickup underneath our trees at Glen Echo. We continue to work on picking up the Sweet Gum balls as well. We need to hurry with this work because the grass is beginning to grow and we will have to be cutting on a regular basis in the not too distant future.














Assistant Mike spraying greens on Thursday with a micro-nutrient application and a soil
building product called Humega. http://biofloraag.com/Organic/humega.htm
Interesting bit of trivia, Eddie Albert of Green Acres fame was a front man for this company when I first got in the business in 1990.

Assistant Skip is putting a nice clean up mow on the zoysia tees. They are slowing beginning

to green up but are not growing as of yet. Our efforts were to help in cleaning up the surface and to cut off some of the dormant material. We are going to cut our tees at .5 inches this season instead of .55. Not a great deal of difference but I think the cut will be improved. We might raise the height slightly during the worst part of the summer to help the cool season tees survive the heat.

Assistant Mike using the vibratory roller on the 1st blue tee which we aerified at the same time as the greens. The aeration created some undulations and heaving of the turf's surface. The roller assisted in smoothing the surface of the tee.

Our babies continue to grow in the green house. Our impatiens started with about 3-4 leaves and now have more than 10 leaves per plant. A couple fatalities from time to time but all are doing pretty well. The tropicals are not liking these cooler nights. The hole in the wall on the left side of the picture is going to be where our heat duct from the building heating system is installed. My younger brother is a sheet metal worker and is going to fabricate the work for me. Space heaters are taking care of the heat for now.