Spring has arrived and the Illini Greens & Grounds team is starting to shift its focus from winter course work and projects to preparing the course for the season that lies ahead. While this is an exciting time of year where everyone is looking forward to nicer weather, longer and sunnier days, and getting outside of the house; I want to take the time to recap the Tree Enhancement Program that began this winter at Illini Country Club.
Over the course of the past year, the Club has invested in equipment that allows our Greens & Grounds team to conduct tree work in house that we would typically have to hire a contractor to execute. While the use of a contracted tree service is still necessary throughout the year, we were able to start pruning and removing trees within the capability of our new equipment.
Illini Country Club is a unique property that is home to many different species of trees. The majority of the trees on property are Oak, Maple, and Pine, while there are Sweet Gum, Ash, Magnolia, Linden, and Ginkgo scattered throughout the golf course as well. There are 3 main goals of the Tree Enhancement Program:
1. Prune dead, decaying, and low hanging limbs
2. Remove trees that are dead or decaying
3. Prune limbs or remove trees that are affecting golf course playability or limiting sunlight to grow healthy turf
The Greens & Grounds team uses several factors to evaluate the trees on property: safety, turf health, and aesthetics, with safety being the most influential factor considered when deciding to remove a tree.
A lack of tree maintenance in past years requires that almost every tree on the property needs to be pruned at minimum, while there are also a handful of trees that need to be removed primarily due to rotting and decaying trunks. You will see trees on the golf course that have a pink ribbon around them, this is "tagging" the tree for removal. Once the trees are removed or pruned the Greens & Grounds team is reusing the tree to create byproducts so nothing goes to waste. A Vermeer chipper is used to mulch the limbs and the mulch created is being dispersed in landscape beds around the golf course. The parts of the tree that are too large to process through the chipper are being cut into firewood length and then split into firewood for use.
