The Sand Fairy

The sand fairy has been visiting Cinnabar every other week for the last 6 weeks on Sunday nights. With our seemingly never ending spray schedule, I have found that Sunday nights work out best for now. I come in around 7 pm and finish up by 10:30 at night. As soon as I am done, I put down a heavy amount of water to work it in. Doing this at night provides a pretty good product to you the customer and allows us to continue on with our spray schedule. It also allows me to get sand out every two weeks which is essential since we are not aerating in the spring.

I have changed the sand to a smaller particle sand, but not smaller than what our green's root zone is made of. The rule on topdressing is that you always apply coarse or equal over fine and never the opposite. If you do fine over coarse, you will plug up your rootzone and have a lot of other problems. A lot of people got in trouble with this when some of the newer bentgrasses came out in the 90's. The newer bentgrasses are so tight that it is very hard to get the topdressing sand worked in. Their solution was to use a fine sand and a lot of these courses have to aerate more now because they plugged up their rootzone.

Since we are seemingly putting out more sand than in previous years, please spot me on the course and ask any questions you may have. Thanks

Roots

Last week I was out taking our annual soil tests and was amazed by what I had found. A soil sample is taken to a depth of 6 inches and I saw roots coming out below that mark. I was so amazed that I went and got a ruler and measured 7 inches of roots!!

I have always read stories about guys with big root systems and I have even seen pictures of nice roots, but have never actually had them (if you're wondering; yes, this is turf porn to me!). What product is causing these great roots isn't for sure, but I believe I have it down to two products that I have started using this past year. What is funny is that I was thinking of eliminating both products because the application of them are very difficult. I think I will deal with the tough applications if I get results like this.