No Carts This Morning

As expected, the course is still very wet from all the rain we have gotten in the last few days.  Unfortunately, we will not be able to allow carts on the course this morning.  The sun is coming up and the skies are clear, so we will re-evaluate at noon to see if carts are possible for the afternoon.  As always, the course is still open for walkers and caddies are available, so come on out and enjoy Memorial Day at the Club.

Our friend the sun, finally making an appearance!

Memorial Day Golf

Well, we just can't seem to catch a break.  After having marginal conditions for cart play this morning, we were all hoping that we would not get anymore rain today.  Obviously, that is not what happened.  This afternoon we received another .75 inches of rain that we did not need.  Now we have gotten over 4 inches of rain in the last five days.  Needless to say, the golf course is completely saturated.

Considering how wet the course is this evening, the chances of us being able to have carts in the morning are fairly slim.  There have been mornings that the course has surprised me and drained quicker than I expected, hopefully tomorrow is one of those mornings.  Check here in the morning to find out the status of the course and carts.  I will begin evaluating the course around 5:00 a.m. and will try to have the status posted here before 6:00.  As always, if we can't have carts you are welcome to come out and walk.

Here are a couple of pictures of the course from this afternoon.

#18 Fairway From the Tee

#12 Fairway Looking Back Towards the Tee

Carts are going this morning!

Although it rained a fair amount yesterday evening, carts will be going this morning.  We really dodged a bullet on this one though.  The thunderstorms were running in a straight line west to east, and we were right on the edge of it.  Talking to other area superintendents this morning shows just how lucky we are.  Here at Calumet we received 0.6" of rain, go two miles south to my house and find 0.7", another mile south of there at Idlewild, they got 0.8", and a little farther south at Prestwicke CC they got 1.1".  The real whopper that really shows how lucky we are is Lincolnshire CC, pretty much straight south of here, received 3 inches of rain!

That being said, the course is still very wet as we now have received 3.25 inches of rain in the last week.  So please be very careful with your carts.  We will try to rope of some of the worst areas, but please pay attention to where you are driving and keep your cart on the cart paths where there is one available! 

Time For Some Color

Now that the risk of a hard frost is almost completely passed, we have begun to plant all of the annual flowers around the clubhouse and the golf course.  We received our first delivery of plants Thursday afternoon and started planting them this morning.  A majority of the planting will be completed today, but we won't finish everything until next week, just in time for the holiday weekend.  Still to be delivered next week are all the potted plants, hanging baskets, and a few more plants that we came up short on. 

You may notice that many of our bed designs stay somewhat similar over the years, but the colors change.  Our grower does most of the design work and tends to have a color scheme that ties many of the beds together.  This year the two major colors are yellow and pink.   Those aren't two colors that I would have thought to put together, but it looks like its going to end up being a great look.

The first picture our "stash" of flowers behind the shop before we started planting, and the second is of Alfredo and Roberto working hard to get as many flowers as possible planted before the weekend. 

It would certainly be nice if mother nature would wake up and realize that it's supposed to be the middle of May.  Not only is it very cool this morning, we have a light frost on the golf course that is keeping us from getting to golf course work right away.  This is late for frost, but certainly not unheard of, in 2003, I actually remember having a frost on June 1st.  That was late.  Many people say that you are safe to plant frost sensitive flowers outside, but to be truly safe you need to wait until Memorial Day.  Our flowers are coming this week, and given the way this spring has played out, I hope that we are going to be safe from frost. 

Even though the frost keeps us from working on the course, it's nice once in awhile to have one to get some things done off the course.  Right now the guys are working on patching some cart path pot holes, cleaning inside the shop, and cutting up some branches and trees that fell yesterday.  Not having been out on the course yet, I don't know the full extent of what is on the ground, but there are two trees between the 15th hole and 18th green that were blown down yesterday.  Hopefully those two trees are the only things that were damaged, they really aren't important to the course and were leaning ash trees that were already infected with Emerald Ash Borer.

15 Drainage

We are making another mess.  The wet area on at the bottom of the hill on 15 fairway, is much worse this year than it typically is.  So bad that the water forced the turf to turn into a bubble in the intermediate rough.  When we started, we had no idea what kind of drainage existed in that area, so we dug where the bubble had formed.  What we found was two clay tiles coming together with one draining nicely and the other not working, and this left the water with no where to go but up to the surface.  After cleaning out one section of the pipe, we found another break in the pipe in the middle of the fairway, and we hoped that by fixing this break and clog, the problem would be remedied, but it wasn't.  Instead of trying to follow a drain line that could be over 75 years old and trying to fix every break or clog in the pipe, we are going to reroute this water to pipes that are newer and flowing well.  This drainage project should be completed today, and we are going to try to get the big hole on #3 closed up before the weekend. 

The beginnings of our mess.  (The pipe you can see is not the culprit)

This one IS the culprit. 

Busy Week

We finally got a dry week, and that means that we had a lot of work to get to that had been postponed.  It's been a very busy and productive week.  The only problem is that whenever we cross something off the to-do list, we add two or three more things.  It's a never ending battle to try and accomplish everything we would like to do on the course. 

Over the course of the week, all of our bentgrass areas got their first fertilization of the spring.  Greens were fertilized on Monday, fairways and the range tee on Wednesday, and tees on Thursday.  Fertilizer has to be watered in to prevent burning of the turf, so this is why you may have seen sprinklers running this week.  Those of you who saw them on probably thought we were crazy for watering when it was just a week ago that we were complaining about how wet the course was.  Fertilization of the fairways is also why you may have seen a monster truck cruising the course.  We use an outside company that can fertilize all the fairways in about two hours.  It would take us an entire day with three people working on it.

The "Monster Truck"

We also managed to make a bigger mess out of our drainage repair on number three.  The holes got expanded in an attempt to find the pipe that the water was coming from and we had success!  After digging a wide hole that is nearly five feet deep we found an 8 inch clay tile that has probably been in the ground for 75 years.  We haven't been able to determine everything that ties into it, but it is a lot, so there could be many problem areas solved by getting this one pipe to flow freely into the ditch.  Right now, we are trying to let as much water out as possible so that it is easier to work on, but the water keeps coming.  It has been flowing freely for 48 hours now, and isn't showing any signs of the flow dropping. 

We've got a gusher!

Yesterday, (Thursday) we were able to aerify the collars around the greens and since we are modifying our greens aerification to solid tines, we core aerified the outside four feet of every green.  This is a very high traffic area, and every little bit of aerification we can get in those areas is a big help.  Coming up on Monday we will be aerifying the greens with small solid tines, topdressing with sand, and applying some soil amendments that will help get the greens through the upcoming summer.

I know that many of you have taken note of our resident Red Tail Hawks that soar over the course, but there is plenty of other wildlife that shows up on the course.  Some sightings are rarer than others though.  Once in a while a deer will find it's way on to the course by jumping the fence.  This was taken on Wednesday.  Click on the photo to make it bigger, I wasn't able to get very close to the deer for a camera phone pic.



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.