It's the last week of October and we are pretty much on schedule with all the preparations needed before the snow flies. The awesome weather has allowed us on the course in good time each day with frost only being a problem over the past couple days. This time of year frost usually sticks around until "noon-ish" which drags out most of the fall prep activities, especially the fall spray treatments.
Last weekend was the fall work bee (go HERE) with a nice turn out and even nicer weather. With only a few trees to clean up (dead fir on 2 G, all the weedy poplars back of 14 G) a large number of people were able fill divots on 4,5,6,8,9,11,16,17, and 18 Fwys. If you missed this work bee don't panic since I'm pretty sure there will be one in the spring. They are such a huge help.
The crew completed a very minor irrigation expansion located between 6 and 8 greens. This area is somewhat out of the way but because of inadequate coverage it shows moisture and heat stress early which easily creeps into the neighbouring surrounds on both 6 and 8 greens. Ultimately, this expansion will continue onto 8 green where we will install irrigation for the surrounds as well as continue to the cart path on the right of 8 green. I get to hear players complaints about how rough the ends of certain cart paths are and the one on 8 is probably the worst. The concentrated traffic and no irrigation make more that difficult to keep turf established in that area. I know from past experience that sodding the end of a cart path with no way to irrigate is guaranteed to fail.
In future posts I hope to cover some of the geeky tech things we do. This will be the first installment. One of things I like to do is gather information about activities on the course. This information gathering in relation to fertilizing and tracking pest/disease outbreaks allows us to create a data base which we often use as a reference. There is numerous companies offering specialized software and devices for just what I describe but in our situation they are not a necessity and are too expensive. However, as is my style, I'm always trying to cheap out and bastardize a "made in Kimberley" solution. I started with aerial photographs with mylar overlays and felt pens but a pal gave me an old "I-thing" onto which I was able to download particular apps and now I can map fertilizer applications with GPS and upload to a site which stores the "track". Go HERE to see the most recent fairway fertilizer (clicking the "satellite" toggle in the upper left corner of the picture gives a real life picture). My hope is to use this more in the future to track all applications on the golf course that will easily viewed by all.
