Rain, Rain, Rain now Frost, Frost, Frost

After a couple fabulous weeks of weather earlier this month, it now looks like we are finally getting to some winter weather. In the last five days we have received 1.34" of rain and now that the rain looks to have slowed down the cold weather is upon us. As I write this post it is 31 degrees and dropping. The chance for frost looks good through Friday morning.  Hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving!!

Drain in front of #6 Green

Over the last couple months the maintenance staff has been working to dry up the area in front of #6 green over to the ladies tee on #5. The staff is in the final stages of the last of three drains that will hopefully get this area a little drier and more playable. Once the drainage and rock are in place we will come back and sod over the drains to create a more playable look. All but one of the drains were put in to help move water from old drains into the new drainage system. Thanks to our assistant superintendent, Tom Laycock, for orchestrating the design and making this project move in the right direction. Below is a picture of the last drain that is being put in at the beginning of the approach on #6.

I love Monday Mornings!!!

Do I need to say any more?

Light verti-cut today and Light topdress tomorrow

This morning we did a light verti-cut on the greens and tomorrow we will do a light topdress with the tycrop (see picture below). The sand is used to help dilute our thatch and smooth out the greens.

Who doesn't like new equipment?

Since our recent renovation that began about a year and a half ago, we have been fortunate to have purchased a lot of new equipment. In the last couple of weeks we were again very fortunate to purchase a new Toro ProCore 864 fairway aerifier. This is going to be a great addition to our maintenance fleet as we are now going to be able to renovate a few areas that have been struggling and in the spring we will now be able to core aerify all the fairways and tees.

Our plan in the next few weeks is to use a 5/8" solid tine on all 20 acres of fairways to help increase our infiltration rates through our wet season.. We will also be reseeding parts of the front half of #6 fairway and a few rough areas that lost turf during our dry summer. Although a lot of the areas have really bounced back due to our recent rains.

Time to blog again!

I have recently decided to continue with more blog posts. It's been about 9 months since my last post, and even though I've thought about posting, I just haven't gone thorough with it. So, as a way to force myself to take more pictures of our course and another way to keep records of  "whats happening" on our course, here's to blogging!!

What to do when it rains???

What does the crew do when it's raining? When the rain comes we don't always go home. We spend the time going over training, planning future projects, but mostly cleaning.

The current maintenance shop is pretty old and seems to attract dust. So when we get the chance we try to keep it swept clean so that our employees have a clean environment to work in when at the shop.

In the pictures above is one of the projects I have been wanting to start for the past six months, but we just haven't had the time. As you see in the picture, we are prepping and painting a bed-liner onto the back of our John Deere Gators. These are the carts we use to get around the golf course on a daily basis. Hopefully this process will help to keep the carts in better shape and be able to handle our outdoor elements.

Why the need for a fence?

For those of you that may be wondering why we installed the split rail fence along the 1st tee, it was to control traffic across the first tee and to limit turf stress. It may now be a longer walk to the putting green, but we hope this fence helps us to maintain better conditions in this area. This fence was installed in-house by a couple of our very talented golf maintenance staff.