Glen Eagle Maintenance (11/1/124)

I hope everyone enjoyed Halloween, the unofficial kickoff to the fall season. Sunshine and moderate temperatures lately have the course turf tightening up and turning a really pretty green.

The turf on our course is a warm-season grass which as I bet you can guess means it likes warm temperatures. That often leads us to believe the hotter the temperatures the more the turf likes it but that is not necessarily so. If it was, we would call the turf a hot-season grass. While the turf is tolerant to our hot summers, it prefers more moderate temperatures. Generally, the time(s) of year that the turf performs best are when the low and high temperatures for the day added together equal 150 degrees.

Today for instance, the low temperature was 70 and the high 86, a total of 156.

A typical summer day it would be more like a low of 78 and high of 97, totaling 175. During periods when the temperatures are that high, often the turf puts most of its energy resources into survival and doesn’t produce the nice look and playability that it does during the spring and fall.

Here are a couple pictures of the course with a consistent green and uniform growth.

Last week the fall annuals were planted and this week our team has worked hard on sprucing up the landscaping and the mulch at the Davis entrance and Clubhouse. The trees at the Davis entrance were also trimmed so that the Christmas lights could be hung for the upcoming holiday season.

Here are some pictures of all the activity from the week!

I often get asked what flowers we use so I thought I would create a short list here incase anyone is interested in doing similar plantings at their house.

This year we are using Begonias, New Guinea Impatiens, and Salvia. These plants are commonly found at nurseries or big box home improvement stores in our area.

I look forward to seeing everyone on the course, and as always, if you have any questions, flag me down or shoot me an email. I always enjoy talking turf!

Glen Eagle Maintenance (10/25/24)

The weather has been just about perfect lately and the golf course is looking pretty good! 

The color of fall seem to be everywhere we turn these days. Most of the color is a result of the salt that was blown during Hurricane Milton. The Cypress trees seem to have been effected the most.

It also did a number on the vines in the trees. In the picture blow, the brown in the trees on the left side is from leaves dieing on the vines. The good news for the trees is that while they look dead, they aren’t. The leaves are simply “burnt”.

Bald Cypress trees do loose their leaves in the fall anyways and are “bald” during the winter. This gives the appearance that they are dead but they aren’t. It looks like that salt spray may have sent the leave drop into motion a little quicker this year.

The fall annuals were planted today and will be full and beautiful in just a few weeks!

I look forward to seeing everyone on the course, and as always, if you have any questions, flag me down or shoot me an email. I always enjoy talking turf!

Glen Eagle Maintenance (10/18/24)

I thought this was funny but all kidding aside, the drop in temperatures has been such a nice change after the long, hot, wet summer we experienced this year. 

The golf course is starting to rebound from the salt burn that occurred during Hurricane Milton and it’s looking pretty good everything considered.

 

We were extremely lucky and didn’t have any major damage from Hurricane Milton. As I mentioned earlier, we did have one unexpected side effect - salt burn. We have seen it on the turf and many of our trees and landscape plants. 

We don’t see this type of salt burn with every storm because in most storms, rain accompanies or follows the storm and flushes the salt off the leaves and out of the soil. Milton was unique in that the rain came before it and the storm itself was mostly wind.

For the most part the salt burn is temporary damage where the salt desiccates the leaf tissue. However, salt has negative impacts on the soil, and turf. In a normal year, salt from irrigation water builds up in the soil and is taken up by the turf during the dry season. Every year, Superintendents wait on the first big rain of the summer to flush the salts, cleaning the soil and allowing other nutrients to be taken up by the plant. With the additional salt accumulation from Milton, and the rainy season over, we could have saltier soils and therefore more plant uptake over the dry season. We will hope for periodic flushing (1”+) rains to help dilute the salts over the upcoming dry season. Only time will tell how this additional salt will affect our turf. 

Most of damaged leaves will fall off, some will have to be trimmed off and in the turf removal of the damaged leaf tips will happen as we mow and as new growth is regenerated. It’s also important to note that the plants are not dead, just the leaves. So for the next few weeks, we will experience somewhat of a Northern Fall where we have piles of leaves to rake, blow and remove.

Here are some pictures of the salt burn. You can see the worst burn is where the water pooled. What I find really interesting is the burn is worse on the East sides, which makes sense due to the winds coming out of  the West.

Salt, translocated to the tips of the leaves and causes the tip to “burn” or turn yellow/brown.

Mowing off the tip burn…

Here are a few pictures I thought were particularly interesting…

The water was high in the lake on 12 prior to Milton so when the salt blew it was protected and didn’t burn. We ended up with a nice green strip around every lake.

The West side of 17 green/collar (protected side)

East side of 17 green/collar (exposed side)

Here is an example of the burn on one of the plants at the clubhouse…

West side

East side (you can see the burn on top too)

One of the reasons I like my work is observing what Mother Nature serves up. Every storm, every situation is different and no day is ever the same.

I look forward to seeing everyone on the course, and as always, if you have any questions, flag me down or shoot me an email. I always enjoy talking turf!

Glen Eagle Maintenance (10/10/24)

 Not much maintenance this week. Most of the week we were preparing the course and our homes for Hurricane Milton. Luckily, Glen Eagle and our staff made it thru the storm with very little to no damage. There were thousands of sticks and pieces of small debris which we started removing today and will continue to pick up over the coming days. We will be open Friday but it will likely take us well into next week to catch up with mowing and debris removal.

This week was unusual; as we prepared for Milton, a subtropical low not associated with Milton brought us 7.27” of rain before Milton ever arrived. That was concerning for two reasons. One, if Milton’s had brought us the amount of rain it dropped in central Florida, the lakes wouldn’t have had much capacity to receive it. Second, strong winds on saturated ground is a recipe for falling trees. Amazingly, we only received 1.88” during the storm so our lakes actually went down, and while our winds reached 50 mph, no trees fell during the storm. To say we were lucky is a big understatement.

Didn’t have a lot of time for pictures this week but here are a couple from Thursday as we cleaned up the course. The turf hasn’t been mowed since Monday so with all the rain and a little sunshine, it is really green.

I did get a picture of the steps on 13 after they were finished last week. They turned out pretty good!

I look forward to seeing everyone on the course, and as always, if you have any questions, flag me down or shoot me an email. I always enjoy talking turf!

  

Glen Eagle Maintenance (10/3/24)

 Hard to believe it is already October. I can tell you it sure doesn’t feel like it in Naples. 90+ degrees every day with feels like temperatures of 105 sure seems like summer. The rain and lighting still knocks on our door every day with up to 8” predicted in the next 7 days.

It has been nice to see many of our members back over the last week or so and I know many more will be returning very soon. Hopefully someone will bring a little cooler weather with them.

We are still working on detail work coming out of the summer maintenance and the course is looking pretty good.

One of my and the greens committee's initiatives this summer was to identify potential safety issues and address them where possible. Items like the blind spot behind #18 green where chimes and a message on the golf cart screen were added to alert drivers of potential oncoming traffic. Also, adding stairs to the steep slope at the #1 tee on hole 13.

Here are some pictures of the stairs in different stages of the project. They should be completed this Friday.

We are still doing some cleanup from the storm. Here are the guys working hard to save a tree on the left side of #8.

I look forward to seeing everyone on the course, and as always, if you have any questions, flag me down or shoot me an email. I always enjoy talking turf!