On The Course July 12th

Rubiel and Joel working on mowing greens this morning.

We are mowing and rolling greens this morning. Brandon will be setting pin locations for the day and Javier is servicing the tees. Troy is working on some irrigation issues around the Clubhouse and will be spot watering areas of the golf course later this morning. When we get into a long run of really dry weather our outdated irrigation system really starts to show its weaknesses. As we identify some of the issues we are able to make some adjustments  to correct the problems but sometimes it is just a matter of irrigation head spacing or lack of coverage on some areas.

We have a weather system moving into to Western Minnesota this morning that could affect the Twin Cities later this afternoon. As we have seen in the past couple of weeks most of the rain systems that move through during the day dissipate as they get closer to the course. The humidity is a little higher this morning and  that might allow some of the rain to actually get to us. The forecast temperatures and dew points are looking to be getting into the "tropical" range over the next couple of days. We will be adjusting our irrigation practices to account for some of the higher dew points and humidity levels. The course made it through the last heat stretch in pretty good shape and we want to make sure we continue that through this weekend and into the beginning of next week.

Brown Patch ring next to the lens cap from last week on #14 collar

We have been seeing some turf disease showing up in a lot of rough areas throughout the golf course. As we see these areas we can justify our fungicide program that we have in place and know that we are keeping our fine turf areas protected from most of the diseases. We have seen some Brown Patch on a couple of collars on the Championship course and have made a couple adjustments to our program to combat it. We are seeing Dollar Spot and Pythium in a few rough areas as well as the new seeded area on the Executive course. We are always scouting and looking at key areas of the golf course that we have typically seen turf diseases in the past.