Maintenance Update 03/21/12

We received 5" of rain from Monday evening through Tuesday morning.  The creek flooded holes #1, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 18.  While areas of these holes are a mess, the south side of the course is ok.  We will keep the course closed today to concentrate on clean-up and should have the course back open for play on Thursday. 

On Monday, we were able to get nearly all of the course aerified before the rain started.  I used a deep-tine aerifier to aerify holes #1, 7, 8, and 10 as well as all of the high traffic areas between the fairways and cartpath on the rest of the course.  This aerifier is able to penetrate down around 8" and has a "fracturing" effect to greatly alleviate compaction.  We used our normal fairway aerifier for the rest of the fairways.  We added close to 500 pounds to this unit and were able to aerify down to about 4".  I am anticipating the south side of the course will be dry enough this afternoon to get mowers out and clean up the tufts of grass.  Also, with the rain and the course being aerified, we will be cart path only the remainder of this week to allow time for recovery as well as allowing all of the wet areas to dry out without damage.

Also with the recent weather, we have seen some pretty substantial growth in all of the turf.  We will be raising our rough units to 1.5" to minimize the amount of clippings.  Last year, we were able to stay at this height throughout the growing season, granted we were also in a drought.  The previous year, we had to raise the height to 2.25" because of the clipping yield, which greatly affected the rate of play.  We will do what we can to maintain the roughs at 1.5", but I will continue to make the determination as we continue to head into the growing season and the amount of clippings.  It takes us approximately 5-6 full days of mowing to get around the entire course.

The bunker crews have remained busy.  The trap on #1 was completed last Friday.  We are waiting on area sod farms to have a decent supply of sod before adding sand to the other bunkers.  As of last week, sod farms were only about 10% green.  We took delivery of 6 pallets of sod last Wednesday, but I didn't think it was the quality I wanted to see.  We took sod out of the fairway on #16 to place around #1 bunker so it would be ready for the weekend.  Hopefully with the warm weather, sod farms are seeing a quick green-up and we will be able to get the bunkers on #7, 8, 6 and 17 completed next week.  After 5" of rain, no sand was washed from the face on the new bunker on #1.  The water level had risen into the bunker, with some settling of silt on the surface of the sand, but this was removed Tuesday afternoon and fresh sand was applied.