Final Weekend Wrap Up

We shut down for the season this coming Monday and as early as it seems it is pretty much time as very few people are out golfing, especially with the the icky weather.  Preparation wise I've started applying plant protectants at the beginning of September and my deliberate and not so deliberate, i.e. misses, check plots let me know that disease is definitely around and would be causing havoc if not for those preventative applications.

The Browns Spots are Bad Spots

As good as the preventative sprays worked I suspect the past weeks weather has created plenty of disease pressure so we need a change so I can get out keep the bad fungus at bay.

As has been the case for what seems almost over a decade, we haven't had the opportunity (mostly do to finances) to plan any major projects to update/modernize areas on the golf course, especially as it relates to the layout.  So in an effort to keep motivated and because we didn't need to do any major river work this fall I decided to address one of the numerous deficiencies in our almost 40 year old irrigation system.  As boring as it may sound, adding extra sprinkler heads makes a big difference to me and my staff by redistributing resources especially as they relate to labour. The area I chose to add extra irrigation was the rough between 6 and 18 fwys.  Again, a seemingly out of play and unnecessary location for water but what you may not know is number of times we run hoses and sprinklers at that location overnight throughout the season to keep it green.  Also, and somewhat ineffectively, I tend to run the irrigation stations on 6 and 18 fwy at a higher run time in an effort to stop the moisture stress from creeping into the fwys which has a tendency, especially on 6,to make the fwys gooey.  When we re-built the driving range a few years back we needed to run control wires from the controller on 10 fwy so I took that opportunity of having an open trench to run extra wire as far as 18 green with eventual idea of addressing the irrigation at the green as well as adding zones for extra irrigation around that green. We are making use of that forethought to run two extra wires over to the left rough on 18 near the green and install 2 new irrigation zones.

Trenching, Laying Pipe, and Backfill all at once

With no play and bad weather we focused on installing 4 heads and 300 feet of pipe in a couple days. The back fill and sodding are a little sketchy, admittedly, but things tend to settle over winter so we can fine tune if needed in the spring.

Next week sees us winterizing the irrigation, collecting all the on course accessories, aerating greens, cutting some trees, and spraying - hopefully!