Fertilizer and bunkers.

The great weather from the holiday weekend has continued into this week and we have been taking advantage of it. It's amazing how quickly we transitioned from wet and sloppy to drying out and running irrigation at night to keep up.

This week we were able to get the fairways fertilized with Nature Safe and put out some fertilizer with crabgrass prevention in the rough. Both of these products have greened up the course in the last few days and really have the course looking great. Also, in the the last few days we have continued adding sand to bunkers and even started sodding out some of the damaged bunker edges. This will not only make the bunkers more consistent and better to play out of, but fixing the edges will help to avoid a very unfavorable lie so close to the green. We will on this next week and get these bunkers into better shape.

Adding sand to #15

Fresh edge on #5

I'm sure you've also noticed that the geese are back in full force. It seems that our harassment techniques only worked to convince them to nest off the property. Now that they have kids they want to bring them on the course and, once they have goslings they are much more difficult to get rid of until the goslings can fend for themselves. However, if we are able to harass them enough to convince them that their offspring are in danger they may walk off the property to somewhere they find less hostile. This is what we are attempting to do, so if you see us chasing around a bunch of goslings just know that we are not going to hurt them, only scare them, and one day that cute little gosling will grow into a large defecating machine that will poop all over our course and tear up the grass on our greens, tees and fairways. Hopefully, our persistence will pay off and they will go live at Heinen's or some other place.

Ian

Catching up.

With the heavy rains last week, we were only able to mow rough on Monday and the week before that we were unable to mow the entire course once. Needless to say our rough is shaggy and because we are not trying to be a US Open course that has 5 different cuts of rough, most of which are long, it needs cut. So, yesterday the rough mowers were able to get about half of the course mowed and they made a mess which we cleaned up by sending a blower around with them. Now, even though the rough is out of control, it could have been a lot worse had we not sprayed growth regulation on the rough this spring. We did this to control the plant's seed head production, but it also slows down the growth of the plant. I know some spots are long out there but it could have been worse, which is a scary thought! The rain that's in the forecast today will probably slow us down, but we should be caught up mowing by the weekend. I'm sorry if you've had to play out of some overly deep rough and I assure you we're doing our best to catch up.

This is freshly mowed and one of our guys will clean this up with a blower but, maybe we should bale it and sell it.

Ian

Heavy rain.

On Monday night there was a large storm that came through the area and dumped 2.1" on us, 1.7" of which came down in one hour. This left the course soaked, bunkers washed and some extra ponds in bunkers and spots where catch basins clogged. We spent the day yesterday pushing up the edges on bunkers to get them ready to be raked.  When it rains as hard as it did Monday night, the water that needs drained is vast and moving very quickly. It brings with it anything in its way and deposits it's passengers whenever the water slows down.What we will do today is to shovel out the silt that was dumped in the bunker bottoms. This process is very labor intensive, but it is also necessary because if we don't clean the silt out, the fine particles that make up silt will further contaminate the bunker sand and slow down how well they drain.

Below is a bunker on #7 full of water. You can see as the water recedes it leaves behind silt that it carried with it on it's way to the bunker.

Here is the bunker on #6. It doesn't have any water in it but it is full of silt. If this isn't removed, not only will the bunker sand be discolored, but water on it's way to the drainage below will be slowed down  and even stopped in some cases.

So, we will clean the silt out of the bad bunkers by hand.

We will have a lot of guys in bunkers today and maybe tomorrow, so please excuse us, what we are doing needs to be done. Thanks in advance for your patience.

Ian

Bunker work and overflow repair.

This week we concentrated on catching up on mowing and getting some detail work done. The guys got the bunkers edged this week and we started adding some fresh sand to areas that needed it today. Tomorrow we will keep adding sand to areas that need it, which will help keep the bunkers consistent and playable. This year we are going to try weed-eating the bunker edges instead of using the more aggressive edger with a metal disk that we have used in years past. We did this because it is a much less labor intensive process and we think that the results are just as good. 

You may have noticed that the pond on #5 was very low today. That is because we opened a valve and drained the pond down below the cracks in the overflow. Once the water was below the cracks, we used hydraulic cement to fill the cracks from the outside. Additionally, we filled the cracks from the inside with expanding foam. We had to wait until the water was below the cracks because, if we didn't the force of the water flowing through the crack would have pushed the products we were using through the openings before they were able to solidify. The cement and foam will dry tonight and tomorrow morning we will re-fill the pond with irrigation water and hopefully not have to deal with this again for a long time. One of our guys, Joe Bodziak, deserves a lot of credit in this job. He was in the pond to open the valve, which he had to do while treading water (in his own wet suit that he bought just for jobs like this because he was sick of getting his clothes soaked) and cementing the crack most of the day today and some of the day yesterday. Working with guys like Joe makes this job a lot more fun and we're glad he's on our crew. 

The valve in the bottom of the overflow draining the pond.

 Joe filling the crack in the overflow with hydraulic cement.

As you can see, we had to drain a majority of the water out of the pond. 

I feel like I end every post with this but, hopefully we won't get too much of the rain they are calling for in the next few days and you guys can enjoy opening day. 

Ian

New chipping area is open

Today we took down the ropes on the new chipping area at the driving range and it is open for business. I hope you guys enjoy this little addition as it nearly doubles the available practice area at the chipping greens.