LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR OF AGRONOMY
December was a busy month with two large outside tournaments and one large couples tournament . The Minor league Golf Tour was here in early December competing in the Citrus Golf Trail Open . Also , the last week in December we hosted over 130 amateur ladies in the Citrus Golf Trail Ladies Invitational . We were able to give them a good golf course and all the players were happy with the setup . It is always a lot of work , but it gives us an opportunity to showcase our product .
It has been a busy couple of months with tree trimming and grinding the debris . We rented the tree grinder and the lift so it was necessary to keep moving . We apologize if it caused any inconvenience . We did a thorough trimming on both courses , and we shouldn ’ t have to trim that aggressively next year . This helped get a lot of the unnecessary weight off the trees helping to extend their life . The trimming also allows more sunlight through to the turf helping to increase turf coverage . In addition , our team will be able to mow under the trees and the golfer will be able to hit more shots out from underneath them . We also trimmed up all the palms that we could reach . Once they grow to where we can ’ t reach them , they will likely be removed .
We did a wall to wall fertilizer application on the fairways , tees and roughs . We were trying to take advantage of the warm weather we had in December . We have started spiking the greens to help with air and water movement promoting better turf . We will continue this process through the winter months and follow up with a light top dressing to help keep the surfaces smooth . We will start putting green pigment on the greens when it begins to get cooler . This will continue to give us some color and keep the turf a little warmer .
A lot of questions have been asked why we didn ’ t over seed fairways . Our main reasons were we wanted to continue to grow the Bermuda and to also continue killing the invasive weeds . You will notice that our fairways are much cleaner at this time . Another big reason is that seed cost went up 100 % and would have cost nearly $ 100,000 . In addition , by not overseeding our nematode problem will decrease because the new and young viable roots the overseed brings are not there . By not overseeding it also allows us to get a jump on applying a wall to wall pre-emergent which will help us in the future to have a weed free turf !
We will continue to fertilize and apply pigment on the fairways every two weeks . This will help the grass to keep growing during the warmer periods as well as give us good color and better grass . Some of the thin areas you see on the fairways is where we sprayed out weeds . If we would have covered the areas up with rye grass we would have those weeds when we came out of dormancy . I am not trying to make excuses just trying to give us better playing conditions in the future .