Week of Aug. 29th

As I'm updating the blog it is officially September!!!!!  August was a wild ride.  The month started off wet and ended with 2+ weeks of no rain.  There were 15+ days in August over 90 degrees with the humidity all over the place.  It was a tough stretch but the maintenance team did everything they could to get through it.  

We started off the week continuing to try and keep grass hydrated to make it through each day.  The crew did an amazing job fighting through the dry weather dragging hoses each and every day.  

As you can see from these pictures we even took out the full circle sprinkler heads in the fairways and used part circle sprinklers to keep the edges of the fairways and rough alive and not over water the middles of the fairways.  You can also see the poor spacing of our irrigation system where in some fairways there is 20 feet or more from the sprinkler to the intermediate rough which only gets half of the irrigation it needs.  This is why, as we have discussed in the past, during prolonged dry periods the middles of the fairways will be over watered in order to keep the edges hydrated.   

Here is our Assistant Matt on Tuesday praying to the rain gods.  His prayers were answered with the course receiving a little over .3" of rain Tuesday afternoon.  

With the rain Tuesday afternoon we were finally able to spray the last application in the new native areas.  We were also able to apply a herbicide application in the older native areas to clean up some weed break through we had in August.  We needed the rain before these application because herbicides work more efficiently when there is soil moisture.  

For the remainder of the week the team will be focusing on course details and preparing for our Club Championship weekend.  Good luck to all participants.  

Thanks for reading.