TPC Snoqualmie Ridge Turf Care: Punching Season Kickoff

Punching season is a love/hate relationship for the maintenance staff and golfers alike. We all know that it makes the golf course better in the long run through improved turf health and quality, but the process is a little bit painful sometimes for two completely different sets of reasons. With that said, I am happy to report that we have now checked one box off the checklist as of yesterday: tee aerification! The entire process went smoothly thanks to the weather, the diligent advance work by our head mechanic that went into preparing the equipment ahead of time, the extra-long hours put in by our greens crew and most importantly, the flexibility and understanding of our golfers as they played around the process.

Moving forward, we plan to aerify our approaches and par 3 fairways next Monday if the weather holds. After that, we will be picking and choosing a few fairways here and there to aerify as we move through the rest of this month and early next month until we are done. The decision of when and where to aerify will be based off of weather conditions (shooting for dry weather) as well as doing our best to balance what other things are on our plate at a given time (what else needs to be mowed, course conditioning, etc). Greens are scheduled to be punched in April, the week will depend on which ends up having the driest weather. By the way, a quick note: as of today, our current rainfall total for the month of March now stands at 11.23 inches so I am hoping the second half of the month is much drier than the first half was!

In regards to specifics on the tee aerification, we started the process on the black, gold and blue tee decks in what was a very small window of dry weather last Wednesday and Thursday. We finished the white and red tees along with the driving range tees yesterday while the course was closed. The dry conditions allowed us to pull a better plug and apply a good amount of topdressing sand to fill the holes behind the clean up crew.

When it is wet or raining, it is much more challenging to keep the process clean and tidy, slowing down the entire process significantly which in turn, increases the potential impact on play and overall course conditions. The plugs get sticky in the rain, clog our core harvester and have a tendency to smear and mash down on the turf. Not to mention, we need dry weather in order to get any sand into the aerification holes to maximize the amount of sand we can get into the holes.

While aerifying the tee decks, we were able also able to aerify the rough in the walk-on/walk-off areas on our tee surrounds which will relive compaction and improve the quality of the turf in these high traffic areas this summer. Also, as I mentioned earlier, following the aerification clean up, a healthy dose of sand was applied to our black, gold and blue tee decks which tend to be a little spongier than the white and red tee decks due to the reduced amount of play they receive compared to the other decks as well as the type of club used on these decks (more woods versus irons). Here are a few pictures of the tee aerification process as we went along.