Turning the Corner?

It appears as if we may have turned a corner in the weather department.  We have now had almost four rain free days in a row!  What's even better is that some of those days had rain showers forecasted, but nothing ever showed up.  Maybe we are putting the record setting April in the past.  We ended April setting a record for the cloudiest in history, in a normal April we get 53% of the available sunshine and this year we only got 32%.  For the month of April here at the course we recorded a total of 6.09" of rain, with rainfall coming on 15 of the 30 days in the month.  Unfortunately, having cloudy and rainy springs is turning into a trend.


Interesting graphic from WGN's weather blog.

 Over the past few years we have made major improvements to the course's drainage system, but when we have heavy rainfall amounts, old weaknesses in the system continue to cause problems for us and new problem areas appear.  The drainage on holes 3 and 6 seems to get continually worse, so we looked at some old drawings and found some old drainage that may be part of the problem.  There is supposed to be a six inch clay tile that runs down three fairway and drains into the ditch near one of the culverts that was replaced last year.  My fear was that the tile was crushed by the heavy equipment that was used to replace the culvert, that doesn't appear to be the case though. 

The mess that we have made on #3 is the result of us looking for this tile.  It's hard to see in the picture, but there is actually a very steady flow of water coming out of the ground there.  The pipe is there somewhere because of the amount of water, but we haven't been able to find it.  When we find it, we will try to find where the pipe is whole, and then run a new pipe to the ditch.  With this pipe being so large and deep, fixing it could solve a lot of drainage problems.  Fingers crossed on that.

This project will have to be put off for a day though, today the focus is on aerification.  The tees are getting aerified and topdressed and will be ready for play again tomorrow.  The process:

Aerifying #10 Ladies Tee



Picking up the plugs with the Core Harvester



Topdressing the tee with sand.  The sand will be left to dry, and then dragged into the holes and the turf canopy with a drag mat.

As you can see, aerifying is quite a process, but a very important one.  On that note, the greens aerification that has been postponed a few times because of the weather is now being modified.  Originally, we were going to pull cores from the greens too, but since aerification has been pushed back close to some golf events we are going to be modifying our plan.  Greens will be aerified sometime in the next week using solid tines that leave a smaller hole and cause less disruption.  The collars and the outside four feet of the greens will still be core aerified due to the high amount of traffic they receive from mowing and rolling the greens.  Core aerfication of the greens will now take place in the fall.