Monday, August 27, 2012

Summer of 2012 coming to a close.


We always say goodbye to summer with a good aerification of the greens. We pulled 5/8" cores last week. We also spot seeded some of the thin areas on the greens. With the 14-28-8 starter fertilizer we put out the greens should be back in good shape by this weekend. 

Sunday, August 12, 2012

July thru August update...........

We have been very busy with the course this summer.  First was that our pump station was hit by lighting June 31st.

 You can see the black marks where the surge protectors exploded. This strike took out 6 fuses, 2 starters for our main pumps plus our PLC controller. We just recently got everything back up and going. Our pump station was down for 41 days this summer. We only had available one small jockey pump running by manual control. Our priority was just to keep the greens watered and occasionally we turned a tee box or two on for a couple of minutes. You can see in the pic below some of the stressed off color bermudagrass.
You can see the difference irrigation makes.







Heat stress on #7 and #3 Greens

Justin spiking #18 green

One of the biggest thing to happen is the installation of fans on #7 and #9 greens. These greens have special needs since there locations are less than prefect for growing bentgrass during the summer.


All in all this wasn't a terrible summer but we experienced some difficult days. We are looking forward to a wonderful fall golf season. We will be aerating greens August 20th and 21st.