Lemon Joy dish soap spells tournament time

Summer showed up one day early this year, arriving on July 4th instead of the usual July 5th. We just had our men's member-guest event at Glendale, which is our largest member tournament of the season. One of the things we do in preparation of the tournament is to spray our fairways, tees, and approaches with Lemon Joy dish soap. I know this sounds crazy, but when mixed with some iron and fertilizer, it makes the sprayed areas shine. We combine 12 ounces of soap, 4 ounces of iron, and .10lb of nitrogen fertilizer in 1.5 gallons of water, and spray that rate per 1000 square feet of turf. In total, we spray 150 gallons of soap.

The spray tank holds 300 gallons,

so we first fill it about 3/4 full of water. Then add the liquid fertilizer and iron, the soap is added last. Since the mixture in the tank is constantly stirred with air agitators, we have to use a product called "No Foam" to prevent the soap from producing lots of foam.

As soon as the tank mixture is sprayed, you can see the shine from the soap. The photo below is taken from #18 fairway looking down to #17 fairway that is one half sprayed. Look how the sprayed area is so much darker in color than the non sprayed fairway. It takes until the next day for the turf to show the color of the added iron and nitrogen fertilizer. After 24 hours, the effect of the three products combined is stunning.

When the sun is shining on the sprayed areas, you have never seen shining power green color like this before. We mow the fairways with a right and left pattern, and when the color of the light and dark mow lines jumps off the suface and hits your eyes, all you can say is WOW! For a big event, you want the golfers to get something extra from their golf experience, and this is it. The color lasts for about five to seven days, but during that time, it doesn't get any better than this.

Divot Police on Patrol

The Glendale divot police are on patrol looking for players who don't replace their divots. Take a look at the photo below and notice that there are three large divots that were filled with sand/seed mix. Also notice that fifteen feet ahead are the three large chunks of sod laying on the fairway. Why didn't the golfers replace their divots? Yes, they filled the holes with seed mix, but that will take at least two weeks to grow back and fill in the hole.

The divots were also overfilled with sand, which kills fairway mower blades and bed knives which are expensive to replace.

The photos below show some of the 136 divots I picked up from the 14th fairway today ( Monday, after a busy weekend). We sent out five guys this morning to pick up divots, and it took them 40 minutes each. That's 3.33 man hours to do the golfers job. These divots have to be picked up by the maintenance crew before we mow the fairways, or the mowers take a beating. It also looks very messy after the fairway mower chops up the divots and spits small pieces all over the fairway.

   I realize that some divots explode into a bunch of small pieces that are not practical to replace. That's the time to fill the hole with sand/seed mix. The photo belows shows a divot I took on 14 fairway. I used a sand wedge and swung as hard as I could. I tore up a sustantial piece of sod.

The next two photos show the divot before and after it was replaced. Look how nice it looks after replacement. You can hardly see a divot was taken.

If you've followed along this far, you can see that replacing the piece of sod is the correct method when filling a divot. I'll make sure that the Pro Shop informs all outside tournament golfers to replace their divots. If we can get the message out to our members to replace divots, we'll be on the way to really improving the condition of our course. If not, watch out for the Divot Police. They'll be on patrol writing citations for failure to replace divots, and all other infractions of golf course etiquitte!