Spectacular Starts

This was the other morning as we started aeration of the 16th and 18th greens.  It rained on us later that day, but boy was the start a beautiful time of morning and great view to wake up with!

Irrigation Update

Well we are slowly heading into fall and the irrigation system is moving into Phase II.  By the end of next week all the mainline piping will be in and buttoned down.  Despite a lot of mess and construction, we are ahead of schedule and on budget at this point.  This is not to say we haven't found a few items along the way.  Old milk bottles, unknown pipes and drains and sometimes bigger items that change the plans on what we do that day.  The picture here shows what happens when you run into a 48" concrete pipe a little over 18" in the ground.

The mainline pipe was already welded and ready to be put into the ground.  Unfortunately we can't slide the pipe under it, it's just too big.  So we needed to dig 7 feet down and splice our pipe under this obstruction.  Many times when we plan out our disturbance for the day, we try to take into player movements and timing, but others like this just ruin all those plans.

We appreciate the patience while we perform this exhaustive task, we hope the disruption has not been too painful.  The hole closing will begin later next week if the weather holds.  Remember we will be closing one hole at a time to keep 17 open.  Once we have completed the work, we open that hole and move on.

Too early to tell when completion will be, but this has been a great start to a very large project.

Aeration and Weather

There are many reasons for the aeration of greens.  Many articles on it's importance have been written and the practice is one of the most discussed among golfers.  Needless to say it is vital to the health of greens and if we were in charge it would be a practice done even more frequently.  But the point of this discussion is the weather impact on aeration and how it effects playability.  To gain a better understanding I will outline our procedures:

1.  Greens are mowed, since we do not mow for several days afterward to reduce the impact of damaging mowers and grass from the abrasive nature of sand.

2.  Aerifier is run across greens,  pulling cores and using shovels to remove them off greens.  We use a hollow tine with an inside diameter of 0.38".  We effectively pull over 240,000 cores on an average green.  This seems like a lot but actually only affect 4.72% of the surface area on the green.   Of course they are all in the way between your ball and the cup!

3.  Sand is then applied across the green. We will use somewhere between 25-40 tons of sand in this process. The sand must be very dry, if not we can severely injure the green while working with the wet sand.  It is difficult to fill that many holes without the sand bridging across the top,  which happens when using less than dry sand.  It gives the appearance of a filled hole until the first rain, then the sand falls to the bottom.  Our goal is to fill more than 85% of the holes to be effective during this large tine aeration at the edges of the season.  Dry weather, dry greens and low humidity are the keys to helping this process be successful!

4.  We next send a full brigade of staff to blow off excess sand or apply smaller amount to fill areas.  After this we apply any fertilizer or minerals that are needed and water in.

5.  We attempt to roll the green but we need to wait until the surface is dry so as to not pick up the sand and products we just applied.  This is why we wait for several days before we begin mowing to allow all this to settle.

6.  Pray for good weather to allow the healing to begin!

Why was the range closed......

The range area was closed this week due to the need to cross the entrance road with the mainline of irrigation.  The line was one of the larger pipes to feed the course from three up to the upper booster station.  As you can see we never know what we will encounter digging under the course.  In this case a large section of rock was found right under the drive in at the gates and we had to employ as jackhammer to get the pipe in the ground.

We moved the location of the mainline to follow the property line to make way for future renovations to the members parking area.  Currently the main irrigation piping goes directly under the parking area, and if we had done the same we would have needed to move this line in the future to facilitate any attempt to improve the range parking lot.  We apologize for any inconvenience during this time.

Rock under driving range entrance