Bunker Edging

At least one time during the summer golf season, we do a major bunker edging. With the monsoon that occurred on Sunday, I thought this would be a good time to start this operation.  We planned to work all day on our closed day on Monday but ended up having to pump bunkers after the rain and lightning ended mid morning on Monday.  Of course that included using 3 pumps to pump out our bunkers until about 5 p.m. on Sunday.  We started our work on Tuesday and hope to complete the bunkers by today.  The bunkers not completed today will be finished next week.  The process includes the following:

• Weedeating around the bunkers about a foot to trim the grass.  
• Use a reciprocating blade on the steeper banks to cut the runners or the edge of the turf back.
• On the shallow side of the bunker, a spade shovel must be used to dig down deep enough to cut the runners.
• The material is pulled out by hand and or rakes.
• The bunkers have all foreign material blown out of them.
• Sand is pushed by the bunker rake from the low end of the bunkers to the upper ends to redistribute the sand and to help place sand on the faces that have washed down..
• If additional sand is needed, it is added to the bunker.
• The bunkers are raked and the edges are hand raked to provide a smooth finished look.
• Utilize a PGR(Plant growth regulator) to reduce the growing habit of the runners.

This is a time consuming and exhausting job for our crew but as we talked about in our meeting this morning, the finished product looks great.  Weekly maintenance of our bunkers includes raking, blowing materials out of the bunkers and trimming the edges and surrounds of the bunkers.  Every couple of weeks, we do a light edging with weed-eaters and the reciprocating blades to reduce the runners that creep back into the bunkers.

We will probably do another heavy edging in late summer that should last the rest of the season.

Jeff using a spade shovel to cut the runners on the less severely sloped areas of the bunker.

Jeff and Demarcus blowing the foreign material out of the bunkers.

Tom Lewis raking the bunker and Joe Scanio waiting to rake the edge smooth.