City of NRH to Begin Creek Work

On Monday, April 11th, the City of North Richland Hills will begin work on lowering the water line in the creek in front of #10 tee.  This is the large blue pipe that is currently exposed.  A path will be made to allow access just to the right of the ladies tee.  The blue pipe will be cut and a new section put in place to lower the elevation of the pipe.  Once this is completed, the rip-rap rock will be extended from its current position to beyond the blue pipe, so no further erosion can occur in that area.  I have asked the contractors to remove as much of the unused abandoned pipe as possible.  I'm not sure of the extent by which they plan to modify the creek floor, if at all.  But I applaud the efforts of the city of doing away with what has been an eyesore for some time. 

The contractors have 45 days to complete this project.  Depending on the weather, they expected to take not much more than two weeks.  During the phase of repair, I will need to place the tee markers on the other side of the creek.  I will get with Nathan and we will decide if it will be better to play #10 as a par 3 or place the tee markers at the beginning of the fairway so it can still be played as a par 4. 

This is a "before" picture of the project.  I will keep you updated with their process.

Maintenance Update April 7th

What a whirlwind the last couple of weeks have been.  We have been very busy on the golf course.  The weather has been outstanding, although the wind has been pretty tough to deal with.  Here are some things we have going on:

• The drilling company has finished the majority of their work behind #13 green.  They are now in the stages of repairing damage.  Most of the cart path has been replaced by #13 green and #14 tee.  The rest of that area should be poured today.  They will then concentrate on repairing the cart path by #12 tee.  They said they expect that area to go a little slower, since they cannot get a dump truck very close.  The spoils will have to be carted down the makeshift trail to the south of #12 tee.  They still expect to excavate the damaged path in one day and pour the next.  They will also do the installation of irrigation that was removed within the sound barrier.  Once that is completed, the entire area will be sodded with bermuda.  Since the company is doing all of the work themselves, we will unfortunately not be able to construct a nursery green in that area.
• We have been paying a lot of special attention to the greens and the areas that have had a tough time coming back from this past winter.  We are out frequently spot topdressing and hand watering the thin areas.  While many greens look great and have come out of dormancy just fine, we are not seeing very speedy recover on #8, #9 and #16.  I have contacted Champion Turf Farms out of Bay City, TX and they will be sending us a small amount of sod to patch a few areas on these greens and wherever else we may be able to utilize the sod.  They typically cut their sod on Mondays then ship it via FedEx.  I expect to receive it by the middle of next week.  Once we get it, we will have to lay it all out and get it watered.  We will then proceed to the patchwork. 
• We are scheduled to aerify greens on April 18th.  We will be pulling a 3/8" core out and filling with sand.  So long as the weather cooperates, I expect a successful process. 
• I have re-marked all of the fairways and approaches this week.  Instead of having just a straight edged fairway, I have added some contouring.  While some areas got a little wider, you will probably notice more narrowing.  I have already heard some concerns with this making the course more difficult.  I don't expect that to be the case, as what narrowing there is is quite minimal.  We also expect to keep the rough a little more playable this year than last year.  Because of frequent rain events last year, we had to bump the height up to over two inches just to keep it maintained.  We will do our best to keep it under two inches this year.  We are currently mowing at 1.25" and will stay there until all of the roughs are actively growing.  Once they are a little more thicker, we will resume mowing the intermediate rough around the fairways and greens at .75". 
• We received right at one inch of rain Sunday night.  Although it came pretty fast and a majority of it just ran off, it was still beneficial.  This has also been the only measurable precipitation since the last snow received in February.  While I won't ever complain about getting any rain, we could sure use a slow soaker!
• We have several new amenities in play on the course.  Our new 50th Anniversary logo has been transferred on to new flags.  I have purchased new flag sticks, new laser prisms and new pin indicator flags as well.  In the past we have had quite a bit of problem with theft, leaving us with a hodge podge of pins and flags.  Thanks to Nathan and the cart staff, the flags are now picked up every evening.  Also, to prevent the laser prism from coming unscrewed from the top of the pins, I applied threadlock to make sure this would not happen.  In case we have an event that requires different flags, we have a backup set of pins with just a regular nut on top.  We also have new tee markers.  I have a friend that does metal work with a plasma cutter.  I was able to send him a pdf of the leaf logo and we designed the new tee markers.  Once they were cut out, they were powder coated.  We replaced the blue, white, green and red markers.  The tips will still be the original stone markers.

As always, I appreciate any and all comments.  Feel free to contact me anytime or just stop me on the course.  Have a great weekend!

Chuck McCaskill

Verticutting Greens

Just a quick note that we will be verticutting the greens in two directions and applying a light topdressing this Thursday (3/17) morning.  We have started utilizing a different sand this year, which has been thoroughly filtered to remove large particles.  This sand is recommended specifically for Champion Bermuda greens.  Because the larger particles are removed, the sand is able to fall into the canopy and not be such a hindrance to play.  While the vertical mower lines may be visible, ball roll should not be affected.

This morning (Wednesday) we successfully solid tined several areas of the greens that needed compaction relief and just a general "airing out".  We did the following greens: all of #1, the back hump on #5, all of #6, all of #8, the top shelf on #9, the back edges of #'s 11, 12, and 13, the front edge of #15, and all of #16 and 17.  Once we were done with the aerifier, we mowed the greens with the walking mowers.  The holes themselves are barely visible but very beneficial.

Also, as of Wednesday afternoon, we have aerified all of the fairways except for #3 and #5, which we will do Thursday.  We mowed some of the fairways today that we aerified on Monday and they look much cleaner.  I anticipate having all of the fairways mowed and cleaned off before the weekend.

Aerifying Greens, Fairways and Roughs

With the upcoming great looking weather, we will begin the process of aerifying fairways.  After a long winter, the fairways are really compacted and still very thin in the more shady areas.  This will help relieve some of the compaction as well as help promote new growth.  We will be doing the process on 3-4 fairways per day.  This will allow us to run the aerifier over the fairway, give time for the plugs to dry, then take our rotary mower over the plugs to pulverize them.  We should finish this by Thursday of this week and aerifying a few fairways per day should minimize the impact to play. 

We will also be going out to "spot aerify" some of the greens this week.  We will be using a solid "star"  aerification tine and the process will be hardly noticeable.  Several greens have thin areas on mounds and edges from the harsh winter and punching with a solid tine will help speed recovery.  We will not actually pull a plug until April 18th, in which case we will pull a 1/4" plug.

In the coming weeks, we will also be aerifying all of the roughs between the cartpaths and fairways to help relieve compaction.  Once we begin this process, we will remain "Cart Path Only" for a couple of weeks to give the turf a chance to thicken and fill in.

As always please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments!

Thanks,
Chuck

Maintenance Update

Good morning!  It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, so I would like to update everyone with what we have going on at the course.

• We started walk mowing the greens on Feb 21.  Since we currently have a limited staff, we will walk mow the greens during the week and continue to tri-plex on the weekends.  The walkers are able to provide a little better surface than just the tri-plex.  The greatest benefit is the weight of the mower.  The walking mower weighs about 200 pounds.  All of that weight is right above the drum roller and cutting unit, providing much more pressure (in essence acting as a roller to smooth the surface).  While the tri-plex mower is much heavier, all of the weight is distributed across the three tires and not the cutting units.  As we begin ramping up our staff for the growing season, we will work to utilize the walking mowers as much as possible.
• We are officially done with the 'temporary' cups on the greens!  We took plugs off of the edge of the chipping green to replace the additional cups on the greens.  We will resume the original rotation of cup changing.
• You can really tell a difference in the way the greens 'greened up' versus the rest of the course.  There was no magical product we applied.  This is merely the difference of the greens being covered during the severely cold weather.  The fairways and roughs are starting to turn green, but it will be a much slower process.  While the greens are actually green, they are not actively growing.  The temperatures have just been warm enough for the grass to begin respiration and photosynthesis, which makes it green.  A general rule of thumb (and has actually been scientifically proven) is that bermuda will not reach peak growing potential until the day time high and night time low add up to 150.  For example, you will need to see a high of 80 during the day and a low of 70 at night.  This is also useful information when applying fertilizer to your yard.  Unless you are seeing the 150 number, any fertilizer you apply to your yard will not be utilized. 
• We started mowing the roughs at one inch.  This is done to remove all of the dormant material and get sunlight down inside the canopy.  The dormant grass doesn't just turn green again.  The green grass is actually new growth.  Removing the dormant material will help make way for the new grass.  We will also lower the height on the fairways for the same reason.  We headed into the fall mowing the fairways at a height of 5/8".  We will lower the height to just under half an inch and maintain that height for much of the growing season.  I apologize for the mess it makes in the rough.  As we get around mowing, we will do our best to follow with the blower and disperse the clippings.
• Our staff has been busy trimming up trees.  While we aren't utilizing a lift, we are using a 'pole' saw and ladder to get small limbs and suckers up to about 15'. 

As you can see, we are getting into the very busy part of the year.  I hope this information is helpful in explaining a little of what we do and why we do it.  As always, if there is anything I can help explain further, don't hesitate to contact me!

Thanks,
Chuck

Striping on Greens

As I'm sure many have noticed, there is some pretty substantial 'tiger striping' on the greens.  I'll explain this best I can.  I've called many courses in the area and all are seeing the same thing.  When the greens were covered, the covers were wrinkled in many areas, mostly from the high winds.  Then the covers were frozen with ice and snow.  The dark lines on the greens display where the covers were not in contact with the turf, as there was a pocket of air between the covers and the turf.  This pocket of air warmed up much quicker, which explains why these lines on the greens are greening up faster than other areas.  The other areas are greening up, but at a much slower pace.  As we did with the fairways, we will go out early next week and apply iron to the greens.  This will help darken the turf which in turn will attract more heat and hopefully, as it continues to be warm, the greening-up will even out.  Below are a couple of examples of green #15:



I have also heard concerns about the fairways.  I believe a local radio golf show stated that, with the long period of freezing temperatures, golf courses across the area would see dead fairways this spring.  I certainly do not feel that is correct.  While the very cold temperatures may slow down the spring green-up, I don't believe we will have 'dead' fairways.  If the freezing temperatures were not associated with quite a bit of moisture, I may be concerned.  But all the ice, snow and freezing rain only helped to insulate the soil.  You can go to any spot on the course, dig through the dormant material and see green material.  As I mentioned, I would just anticipate the spring green-up to be delayed and much slower.

Winter Blast Update

Good morning everyone!

What a winter blast we are currently in.  The forecast has more severely cold weather moving in this week.  With a little break today (Monday), we will uncover the greens to allow them a chance to 'breathe', and recover tomorrow (Tuesday).  We will still not be open for play until Saturday, given the forecast.  The covers will still be very heavy due to last night's rain, so we are planning to just pull the covers off to the sides to allow the turf a little fresh air.

If the forecast holds, we will uncover the greens on Friday, clean off debris, mow and change cups, which will take the majority of the day.  Saturday looks to be a great day and we should be able to open first thing that morning (depending on frost).