Watering Woes and Poking Holes

Water has and probably will be our biggest challenge from year to year. It has now been over 175 days since we've recorded any significant rainfall in our rain gauge. With nothing in the ten day forecast, watering is still at the forefront of our daily thoughts and decisions. Fortunately the days are getting shorter and the demand for irrigation has dropped off significantly in the last few weeks. Our biggest challenge with irrigation right now has nothing to do the quantity of water we have but the ability to get the water on the course.


The picture above shows a couple of our irrigation clocks that were run in to by a golf cart on Saturday afternoon. As of now, our assistant superintendent Tom was able to get one of them working but the other one is going to take a little bit of work and money to get back online. Our Toro irrigation rep is going to be coming by the course on Wednesday to help us get the right parts ordered and get everything back in working order. At this point we are running all of the irrigation on hole #17 by hand.
Well enough with the watering woes, now it's time to poke some holes. If you've been out playing in the last week you'll notice we went through and sliced all of the fairways with our Aerway slicer.


The Aerway slicer is a pretty non-disruptive aeration process that once mowed over isn't really noticeable. After a break this week we will be back out next week with a 5/8" solid tine on the fairways as well as a 5/8" coring of the tee boxes. Once the tees are finished up we will be coring a bunch of high traffic area throughout the course. Fairways and tees should be finished within the week.
- Posted by Austin Daniells, Golf Course Superintendent