New Fescue/bluegrass green surrounds

I thought I would give you the before and after pictures of the sod work we did at the practice green and 18 green, 12 green, and 17 green surround areas. After the pictures I have a description of how the work was completed with pictures.

I haven't had a shot of Lady lately as you can see her patiently waiting for me. This is a view next to the practice green looking toward the road and the club house

Looking the opposite direction from the pictures above to the area between the 18th green and the planting beds.

13th green looking down toward the tee box. The renovated view is looking back up the hill toward the green. We had to replace some of the intermediate first cut of rough which is on the right side of the picture. The bermuda grass had been severly damaged by our bermuda eradication program.

The 17th walk off area is depicted in the two shots below.

The back part of 12 green was replaced.

PROJECT DETAILS

This past Tuesday, the crew began stripping away the sod from four different green surrounds. In the case of the practice green, it was a complete removal of all zoysia/bermuda grass that surrounded the green. We also removed the area between the practice green and the 18 green, 13 about 20 yards from the left side of the green up to the back end of the left side bunker, the back of 12 green and the walk off area on 17.

Below, Tom Lewis is stripping away the turf with a sod cutter.

This is a view looking from the main drive behind 18 green where all the sod has been stripped.

It took the crew about 5 hours to cut, clean and finish grade in preparation for the new sod.

The sod was then pushed into piles. Assistant Skip is doing the honors in this scene.

Much quicker using a piece of equipment to pile it up instead of removing it by hand. In some cases, we did remove some of the material by hand depending upon the location of the sod which needed to be removed.

Russ is working in one of those tight corners.









Nick has been working along the sidewalk edge manually removing the sod from the very edge of the sidewalk.

The loader was used to load up the material and it was then dumped into our single-axle dump truck. We hauled the material away to our dump area. The operator can set his bucket on the ground and the material can be pushed into the loader.

You can see the dump truck in the background and a cleaned and finish graded surface. We utilized the box blade on our tractor to smooth the area. We also use the bunker rake which does a nice job of smooth finish grading.

We then spread a starter fertilizer on the ground and then begin the sod laying operation. Starter fertilizer has a high phosphorus number which helps the plant establish a good root system. We decided to use big roll sod in this application because it saves man hours in the installation and would be less affected by warmer conditions. There are less seams in the sod which helps to conserve moisture. It only has a seam down the middle and where you are forced to lay another piece of sod or if the sod has to be cut for some type of reason. The turf comes in 40 yard rolls which are about 40" wide by about 105' long. When the sod is harvested in the field, it is wrapped in a plastic mesh which helps to hold it together. This mesh is very fine and can be torn with your hands. It has a 1" square pattern The turf is also grown with a plastic mesh which lays on the field after seeding and the turf grows up through the mesh. It strengthens the turf and helps to keep it together when it is harvested.
We removed the plastic mesh that the sod cutter put on the sod to prevent the material from getting caught in your spikes and tripping you. If the sod would get thin in areas or by chance would die, the mesh would then be exposed which could cause the potential tripping situation. We are rolling the sod out forward here but we changed to rolling it backwards. The operator can watch the sod being laid and keep a better line going backwards. If he is moving forward, he has to keep his eyes forward and cannot necessarily see what is going on behind him. If everything goes properly, you can roll out a 40 yard section of sod and slide it against the other pieces in about 5 minutes.

We laid about 600 yards of sod on Tuesday and the remaining sod went down yesterday. Our total sod use for the 5 areas we repaired this week was 33 big rolls at 40 yards each and 3 pallets at 70 yards each.