On The Course October 28th

Gabriel isn't dressed for Halloween! He's Cold!!

 We had very nice weather this past weekend and we are looking at a couple more nice days in the forecast. The practice range has shut down for the season. Pete is aerifying the range floor and we have pulled the covers off of the turf tee to allow it to harden off for winter. All of the golf course accessories have been pulled from the range tee and stored in the shop.

Corey is deep tining the tees on the Championship Tees today after they were mowed. We will begin to pull some course accessories later this week depending on the weather. We are planning on closing the Championship Course on Sunday, November 3rd. This will allows us several days next week to get the Snow Mold Protection applied and get all of the greens covered. We are looking at a couple of rainy/snowy days this week and will be working on getting leaves cleaned up and mulched. There are still a lot of leaves hanging on in the trees.

Jd had a great idea last week of making the course a little "Tough". We let Troy have at some interesting pin locations and it sounded like everybody had a great time.. We found out that you can't enter 0.5 paces from the left edge on our pin locations sheets. We will be keeping the Executive Course open as long as possible as we do not cover those greens. We will be blowing out the irrigation system starting on November 4th.

Superintenden't Revenge pin location on #8 Green

Corey deep tining #10 tee

On The Course October 17th

We have had a rainy couple of days this week and ended up with a total of just over 2 inches. The course is draining and #18 fairway with the XGD drainage installed last week is draining very well. I have included a video above that shows one of the catch basins that was tied into to help the fairway drain. If you cannot see the video you might have to access the blog from a browser. I am very happy with the drainage work and can't wait to see how it performs in the next few rain events that are in the forecast.

We are going to be rolling greens and blowing the leaves off. We will be spraying our first preventative application on greens for snow mold today. Pink Snow Mold can be a problem in cool wet weather and that is what is forecasted for the next couple of weeks. This will set us up for our final snow mold application right around November 1st. We will be watching the forecasts very closely over the next couple of weeks to make sure we have enough time to get the course ready for winter. We are planning on covering greens again with the excelsior mats and will need 3 good days to get that accomplished.

XGD Crew working On #18 last week

On The Course October 10th

XGD began work on the drainage project on 18 fairway Monday morning.  They are currently working on the approach area and from about 150 yards and in.  They should have this area wrapped up by this morning and will then move on to the remainder of the fairway extending back towards the tee.  We will be temporarily making 18 a Par 3 while the guys are working in the landing area from the regular tees.  Thanks for your cooperation while the project is ongoing.  Below we've added a video to get an idea of what is going on.

The crew backfilling trenches.

This is a new main line for the water to gather in the catch basin.

T

On The Course October 5th

We are mowing greens this morning. The course received another 0.4" of rain so we will be unable to roll the greens. We will be cart path only today with spotty showers forecasted for most of the day. Corey is changing pin locations and Rubiel will be running the Sand Pro raking bunkers. Fernando will be blowing leaves with the John Deere tractor. The range tee will remain on the turf for the weekend.

We have XGD drainage systems starting the work on #18 fairway on Monday. We will be playing #18 short on certain days this next week to accommodate the work that needs to be done. We are looking at a pretty good stretch of weather this next week and will be trying to get a lot of work done before winter sets in. We are going to start to deep tine fairways next week and will be working on other small projects throughout the golf course.

Weidenmann XF6 deep tining #12 fairway.

On The Course October 4th

Troy and Corey working on the rough grade for #18 Tee

 We have had 2.5 inches of rain this week with a little more coming later today. over the last 24 - 36 hours we have seen almost 2 inches of rain fall on the course. We will be cart path only this morning and if the back nine fairways drain enough we will open it up to 90 Degree Rule. We have had some decent weather to get the Green Tee on #18 graded and grassed. The banks of the tee were sodded and the tee top was seeded. We will see next week how much of the seed didn't float away with the rain. We have a couple days next week forecasted to be in the low to middle 70's. We should see some germination by Thursday of next week. The tee on #3 is growing very well under the Evergreen Covers. All of the new tees should be ready by June of next year.

The Board has approved some drainage work to be done on #18 fairway. We have XGD Drainage Systems coming in on Monday, October 7th to start installing drainage tile on #18 fairway. The project should take 5-6 days to complete and it looks like the weather should be pretty good. Below is a link to the XDG blog that has a couple photos from Minikahda where they are working on some internal green drainage.

http://blog.greensdrainage.com/

We have the Ming Scramble Shotgun at 12pm today. We are mowing greens, raking bunkers and blowing leaves. We are setting the range on the turf for the weekend. Next week we are planning on covering the range tee to promote recovery and we will hitting off the mats the rest of the season. We are looking at a couple more weather systems moving into the area over the next couple of days.

The Tee Project on #3 is growing in very well.