This week at Sunset: 2-20-2017



This past week at Sunset was another busy one of cleaning the course up in preparation for the Pot ‘O Gold. Darryl and Fletcher have picked most of all the big debris up that has come down from the storms. They have concentrated on picking up pine cones and smaller debris in areas between fairways and around tee boxes. They will continue to do that as we get closer to the tournament.

As far as our short cut areas, tee and approaches/collars heights will be lowered just before the tournament. These are areas that have the most stand of poa annua and so the lowered heights will keep the seedhead in check. The greens are responding tremendously from the great weather we have had. I’ve seen a lot of Bermuda growth from all of them and also in the fairways and rough. The heights on the greens will not change for the tournament. A lot of the maintenance that we’re doing is keeping them smooth and true. Also, I applied a wetting agent to the greens almost three weeks ago which will help with the push-up profile below and will percolate the greens a lot more. This will firm the greens and speed them up.

We had our spring fertilizer and pre-emergent applied to the golf course today(Feb. 20th). This will help with our green-up this spring as well as prevent any weeds such as crabgrass and goosegrass from germinating. I know there has been a heavy infestation of goose and crab in the past and hopefully moving forward we will see less and less of it. We will be applying the 1st application of goose and crab. preventative on our greens next Monday (2/27). We will split it into 3 lighter rates instead of 1 or 2 applications. The product we use can ding up the bermudagrass and so a lighter rate will not yellow the green up nearly as much as 1 application. I have noticed that a lot of the poa annua that I sprayed in the rough a week ago has started to check out. I thought it would take about 7-10 days and so far it’s looking like that is the case. The unseasonably warmer temperatures and the amount of rain we have had since November 15th has really brought on the abundance of poa annua. I hope that this fall that our use of preventative herbicides will cutdown on our poa population.

I do want to mention that I have added 3 guys to our maintenance staff. Please welcome Deshaun Wilson to Sunset as you play your round. He will be a great addition to our already outstanding staff and he will take a big load of work off of everyone as we transition to the growing season. I also have hired 2 ABAC Turf students who will be working in a part-time roll. They are Josh Tucker and Matthew Sims. You will notice these guys mainly working on weekends, but they will also help us out around their class schedule throughout the week. They will be with us until May and then will return to us in August. I will have 2 more guys who will be working in their place during the summer months. I mentioned in my interview for this position that I wanted to create a ‘pipeline,’ of students from ABAC to work here at Sunset. The turfgrass program at ABAC is extremely well-known across the country and it only makes sense that we tap into that resource being that they are in our backyard. The experience they will gain here will be a lot more than the experience they gain anywhere else. Here they will not be just a number, but an integral part of what we are doing agronomically. Please welcome them to the Sunset team.

Thanks for following us this week as we strive to get better every day. As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions/comments that you may have by using this blog, Facebook page, or emailing me at davisjoey@hotmail.com. Thanks for reading!


See you on the course!


Joey Davis

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