Ouch

This morning we had a massive hydraulic oil leak on one of the fairway mowers on the 15th fairway.

This is about as bad as it gets for this type of situation.  It was just about the longest pass the operator made on this fairway and it started at the beginning of his pass.  The leak was behind him, so there was no chance for him to know what was happening until he turned to make is next pass.  When he turned and saw it, he did the right thing and drove through the rough directly to a cart path and stopped the machine.

Unfortunately, the damage was already done as this grass has essentially zero chance of survival.  Tomorrow we will be resodding this area with sod from another fairway, probably the small fairway on 16 short of the creek, and that area will be reseeded.  Another fairway needs to be used so that the turf we bring in will closely match the turf on the rest of the fairway.  The sod lines will be visible, but we would like to make the transition as disguised as possible especially since it's directly across the middle of the fairway.

Fairway Dry Spots

In a "typical" year, we apply chemicals called wetting agents to the fairways, tees, and greens to prevent a condition called localized dry spots (LDS).  With this year not being very typical, and due to some sprayer malfunctions we were unable to apply the wetting agents to the fairways before the condition developed.  Once the LDS sets in, it can be very difficult to get the soil wet again.  Our hope was that the rain we received last week would help alleviate the problems but it didn't.

This picture of the morning dew shows the polka dotted pattern that the dry spots have made on #1 Fairway.  The dots that you see are areas where dew was unable to form because of the dry soil, an evenly moist soil will have consistent dew on the grass.  (It also shows part of our cure for the problem.)

It's a little difficult to see in the picture, but if you look closely at these two plugs taken just inches apart from each other, you can see that the plug on the left is bone dry and just crumbles when it comes out of the ground, and the plug on the right is evenly moist and holds together.  The one on the right is how it should look.

So far these areas have not wilted or died, but if we don't do anything to get the soil to accept water before the summer heats up we could be looking at fairways that are dotted with brown spots.  This week you will notice that we are aerifying selected fairway areas with solid tines, these are the areas that have LDS, and the holes are the first step to fixing the problem.  Next, we will spray a wetting agent that is specifically for curing dry spots over the holes and then the areas will be watered heavily.  This process will get the dry spots to take water and allow our preventative wetting agent applications to to their job.