'What's Up'Date for the week of November 1st - OVERSEEDING!!!

This week we made the jump into winter with our overseeding of the fairways, par 3 tees, and driving range.  We had the same company apply the seed that does our spring time application for mole cricket control.  Instead of a rotary broadcast spreader, they use a blower system that applies the seed very evenly and consistently.  They are using a similar controller that we use on our chemical sprayer to monitor and control the seeding rate, quantity, and acreage covered.  A single applicator started seeding fairways around 7:30 and was finished by 1:30-2pm.  We spread the tie-ins to the approaches and tees and called it a day by 5pm.  The full overseed operation was completed by Tuesday afternoon with a few little touchups.

Then came the rain.  I was happy to see rainfall in the forecast this week to help with seed establishment.  Initially the rain started Wednesday as a nice, slow rain.  All was good.  Then the cells and system continued to grow and we got a few heavy showers.  As the rain slowed in the afternoon, Jeff and I toured the golf course to see how much, if any, seed had washed away or floated to higher ground.  To our surprise we saw little wash out except in a few spots and less floating seed than we had expected.  We actually saw in some select areas seed that had already sprouted and had put up first leaves on certain fairways.  I fully anticipate having some loss of density in a few areas and will be planning on spreading more seed to those areas, but I am very happy with the amount of seed we still found in the fairways after the rain.  As of 4:15pm November 3, we have recorded almost 2" of rain since the day started.

I'm attaching a video of the seeding operation to give everyone a better understanding of the speed and consistency that the application offers.

I was thinking this past month about how dry it had been compared to last year and pulled the records from Wunderground.com - Last October, the average temperature high was 78 degrees.  The average temperature minimum was 63 degrees.  The total rainfall was 5.8 inches.

This year we averaged 80 degrees high temperature, and 57 degrees minimum.  Total rainfall.............0.02"!!!!  What a drastic difference!