On The Course May 19th

 It was a very windy and hot day yesterday. We were out in the afternoon hand watering greens and spot watering the fairways. We ran a very heavy cycle last night and most areas are still pretty dry. We will be running some more water this morning to make sure we can keep up with the forcasted evapotranspiration rate (ET). The ET is the amount of water that we lose accumulated over the day and yesterday it was at 0.29. That basically means we would need to water the golf course with about 0.29 inches of water. We typically want to replace at least 80% of the ET value on any given day. Depending on the forecast and what our soil moisture levels are we might water more or less. The weather is going to get interesting later today with the cold front moving in and the high temperatures for tomorrow only in the low 60's. Hot, humid air in front of a colder system typically means we are in for some thunderstorms. The storms missed us last night.

We are rolling greens this morning and will me mowing greens on Sunday. We did not see enough growth in the greens yesterday to justify mowing again today. The greens have healed in from aerification very well this week and we will back into our normal mowing and rolling schedule next week. The crew will be working on hand watering the flower beds around the clubhouse that were planted this week. We will be finishing planting the flower beds later next week.

We have finished mowing most of the native areas for the first time and will be mowing some areas a second time before we spray them with herbicide. I was amazed yesterday that after we had mowed a couple of the areas that golfers decided it was OK to drive their golf cart through these areas. We still want all cart traffic to stay out of these areas and allow them to grow back tall with no tire tracks running through them.

Sheldon mowing greens with the triplex. We will be back to walk mowers next week.

 Troy was able to haul a couple loads of sand mix out to the forward tee on #14 and we should have it finished and seeded by the middle of next week. We will finish all of our aerification of fairways early next week and then will start working on some rough areas that need some attention. We will also be seeding some thin rough areas on the back nine.

Most of the fairways have been solid tined this week.