Driving range, mowing, seed heads, pond at #9 and Mark's big win.

This week we had a company come in and pour the concrete base for the new artificial tee that will be at the back of the driving range. They were a pretty impressive outfit to see. They showed up Thursday and set the form and put down a base layer of gravel and today they poured the concrete. This will be a very nice addition to the practice area and should maximize use of the range regardless of the weather. Below are pictures of the form with the gravel base layer. Today, after they poured the concrete, they covered it with plastic to trap the heat and I wasn't able to get a picture of the finished product. I'll add one in the next post.

This week we also mowed greens and fairways for the first time of the year. Obviously, this means that the grass is coming out of dormancy and starting to grow. It also means that we're getting close to seed head control; in fact we sprayed greens on Wednesday to control poa and will spray fairways, tees and rough next week. The warm weather we've had so far means that we're about 3 weeks ahead of last year, which probably means you'll be golfing before you know it!

First mowing on greens and fairways. The lighter grass has been mowed.

Some seed heads showing up on greens. We sprayed early enough that we should get great control.

If you haven't seen it, the pond at #9 really looks great. We put topsoil on the hill by the parking lot this week and will seed that area early next week. It really is quite an improvement over the cattails and will be a great source of irrigation water for us.

Finally, Mark's lucky streak continued (he was a partial winner of the NOGCSA reverse raffle earlier this month) when he won Barrington a free bunker. Capillary Concrete is a company that does bunker linings similar to the Better Billy Bunker system we have used in all the other bunkers. Barrington will receive a 1200 square foot bunker lining installation for us to compare to the other bunkers we've done with the Billy Bunker system. It should be very interesting to see how they hold up against each other and it saves us some money on this project! Annika made Mark's day!

Happy Easter if you're celebrating this weekend.

Ian