On The Course May 12th

Jd, Kathy and the Grounds Crew during the Friday Golf Lesson
PUTTING!  Tick Tock

 Today we are mowing and rolling greens. The greens mower lights are still working and we needed to use them for the first couple of holes this morning. It is still really dark at 5:00am with the cloud cover.  We received a little rain yesterday afternoon but will remain 90 degree rule for carts today. Fairways are being mowed and Sheldon will blowing some of the tree seeds off the fairways.

The golf course will be closed on Monday for Greens Aerification. We will have the crew working late into the evening to make sure we have the greens puttable for Tuesday. Aerification is a necessary evil that we must do each and every year to make sure we have a healthy turf system going into the summer. This spring we are aerifying with a small coring tine that will pull a 0.2" plug from the surface of the green. The hole created will be then filled with sand giving the green a lot of new channels for new roots to grow. This will also help firm up the surface of the green. The greens have been a little soft over the past couple of weeks due to all of the rain. The topdressing sand will help the greens firm up over the next couple of weeks and if Mother Nature cooperates we should see a great benefit to this process.

Jason, Fernando and Joel worked on the irrigation leak on #14 approach

 Jason worked on the small irrigation leak that was on #14 approach. From the pictures here this small leak turned into a larger project. When the course was built in the late 1960's the irrigation systems were installed with steel pipe. The steel pipe rusts over time and this creates little pin hole leaks as pictured below. Unfortunately for Jason and Fernando this pipe was over 3 feet into the ground and if you add water to clay soils you get a muddy mess. They worked hard on it Friday and were able to get it put back together quickly and you will barely even notice as you play this weekend. We will be marking the sod cut over this leak as ground under repair.

Pin hole leak on #14 approach 3.5 feet below the turfgrass!!!