In The Fairway - FDL Golf Update June 2024

Welcome to In the Fairway! Our Golf Course Crews have the golf courses looking good and ready for a summer full of golf! In this edition we hope to highlight a few of the things that have been happening out on the courses.

As we are sure you are dealing with in your own yards, the continued rains have been good for growing grass and tough for keeping up with mowing it! While there have been a few days here and there where it’s been too wet or we’ve fallen a little behind, for the most part we have kept up with our mowing schedules. This has been large in part to the addition of our crew of H2B workers. We have worked out a good schedule where they are rotating around to each course which has helped keep us from falling too far behind even with all the rain. We hope that you have seen the difference in our courses already this season!

One of the things we have been able to improve upon this Spring is our landscaping. We have not only been able to clean up and mulch our landscape beds, but we have been able to add plants and improve them. We recognized that this was an area we were not able to keep up with well enough in the past and we are excited to have our clubhouses looking better heading into the season.

As we leave May, our warm season fairways have been green for a while now with the exception of some winter kill in the bermuda at Oxmoor and Polo Fields. We have gone out to some of these areas and done some sod work recently to help some of them to recover more quickly. In some areas we strip sodded which should fill in rather quickly as we get some warmer nights and longer days. We still have some large areas at Polo Fields on holes 1 and 9 that we plan to aggressively aerify. This aerification will do a couple of things: 1) it will help these areas rejuvenate and and grow back in and 2) open up the soil and allow for deeper root growth to help those areas better survive the winter months going forward.

Along with sodding some of the winter kill areas at Oxmoor, we have also gone out and plugged some of the collars that have struggled to fill back in from where we eradicated the dallis grass and crabgrass last fall. We are aggressively fertilizing these areas and will continue to work on them throughout the year. Coupled with a strong herbicide program, we are committed to establishing a good stand of grass in those collars and keeping the undesirable strains out of them!

One of the other challenges our superintendent’s face is having both warm season and cool season grasses throughout the courses. One of the issues we faced this spring was with some herbicide runoff from the warm season grass fairways into the cool season grass rough. Despite applying this on a dry day, some very heavy rains a couple days later caused some damage in the roughs at Persimmon Ridge and Polo Fields. While many of these areas will rebound, we have gone out and sodded a few of the worst ones for a more immediate resolution to the problem.

As we head into June, overall we are very excited about the condition of our courses. With the busy summer season upon us our crews, which now also include some summer help, will be working tirelessly to keep the courses in shape for us all to enjoy. We are very fortunate to have three great superintendents and several other great people working on their teams. If you see them out working while you are on the course, we ask that you consider their safety before you play your shot and wait for them to get out of your way and secondly, take a moment to thank them for their hard work!

We hope you enjoy these updates and we welcome your feedback and suggestions for how we can make your membership experience better! Hope to see you In the Fairway at a Fleur-de-Lis Club real soon!

Hole #3 Persimmon Ridge – Sod Rough at End of Rt. Fairway