Rumors....

In 10 years here at the club I can honestly say that the rumor mill has never been more active.  I have been approached almost every day by members, guests and acquaintances concerned about things they have heard.  Finally, I want to put all the rumors to rest.  The rumors are in-fact true. After 7 years of hard work, planning and politicking, we are now filling the pool with our new irrigation wells.

Over 200 gallons a minute pouring into the pool from the new wells.  Crystal clean water too!   No iron, no sulfury smell just good clean stuff.  We did have it tested by our pool professionals to ensure no issues with metals, silt or chemicals, but it tested great.  And the flow through the 2" hose at 100 psi will fill much faster than the 1.5" city water feed at 50 psi.

We are still working some minor bugs and "odds and ends" to get the pump house finished (I would like to throw a loud ARGHHHHHH!!!! out to all of my frustrating contractors - cmon man!) but the end is in sight.  The new computer software is getting more finely tuned and adjusted to work with the new system and we have had a couple of successful overnight waterings so far.  I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to water the course with good clean water from a reliable, sustainable source for the first time in history.  Kudos to all of the members, committees and boards that supported this project - this water will serve you well for decades to come.  Our days of managing dams and creeks and pumping sludge (or nothing) powered by sketchy electrical infrastructure are behind us.

Monday we put in the high pressure blow off and heat exchanger drain line underground to grab the existing drain tile on the range.  

We had one more power wire to put in for the north-side satellite controllers that was on the old power lines.  Once the new line conditioner is installed by an electrician, we will be able to completely abandon our old pump station.

Okay, so maybe that wasn't the rumor that first popped into your head.  The other little rumor that has run through the club is also true.  May will be my last month at Highland Meadows.  First of all, I want all of you to know that it had absolutely nothing to do with job satisfaction.  I love this place and will forever be appreciative of the opportunity to serve you these past 10 years.  This club, despite some interesting and obvious "quirks" is a wonderful place to work. You have been so supportive of my efforts, whether I failed or succeeded you supported me and respected me.  In short, you let me grow.  I know in my heart I am leaving the club with better conditions and with a very clear path to the future.  The committees and boards are more engaged and more active than any other time in the club's history and you are poised for some seriously exciting improvements.  Despite some very loud opinions of select individuals, I believe that most of this membership is ready for positive change and you have leadership in place now that knows how to get things done.  I am a little jealous that my successor gets to walk into such a good situation to do some really fun work here.

The real reason I am leaving is entirely family related.  As most of you know, I am from the Pacific Northwest.  This past January, my wife's research operations were "downsized" by her company.  This initiated a job search and ultimately landed her a tremendous executive opportunity that we could not pass up.  It just so happened that opportunity will take us back to our home state of Washington.  We will be living in the greater Pullman, Washington area known as the Palouse.  My wife and I both graduated from college there and my wife graduated from high school there as well.  If you have never heard of the palouse, I encourage you to Click here for google images of the Palouse.  It is one of the most interesting and beautiful places in the lower-48 and we are so excited to be headed closer to both of our families.

I cannot thank you enough - especially my loyal blog readers - for the interest and engagement in what we do down here in the grounds department.  Interacting with and educating the membership is perhaps my favorite part of the job and I know that for some of you it enhanced your experience in the club.  Hopefully you learned a little more about what we do and why we do it.

I will keep you up to date for the next couple of weeks before I pass the torch to my successor.  As much as I hope to shake hands or hug just about every one of you, I know that likely will not happen and for that I apologize.  The future is bright at Highland Meadows and I will miss you all.  (Well maybe not quite all - you know who you are).

Good Luck - I wish nothing but the best for this "grand old place".

Opening Day Blues

Finally - Some warm damn weather.  It has been a long time coming, but I am seeing signs of life across the golf course.  We are still quite brown overall, but with some continued normal temperatures we should be able to start mowing off that brown fuzz.  Unfortunately, it's looking like one of those springs.  I've got what they call the "opening day blues" - my desire to get you all out on the course ASAP conflicts with the potential damage that could be done by opening the floodgates too early.  It's a delicate balance that I'm sure is eliciting some not-so-delicate comments from those itching to beat the pea around the course.  I would like to have the greens open by this weekend, but with a rainy forecast (up to 3/4" forecast thursday-friday) and the current condition of the course, I can't commit right now.

During this time of year, I am often asked "how much growth do you like to see before you open?"  To be honest, growth is not really the limiting factor in opening.  Firmness is far more important. Right now, the golf course is like walking around on your mattress. With such cold late winter-early spring temps, the underground frost held until just recently.  In fact, the pump installers were digging a post hole yesterday and there were still chunks of ice and frozen soil coming up around 12" deep.  Remnants of another long, stubborn winter.

The consequence of the late thaw is that more moisture is trapped in the upper soil profile.  With less than robust plants and a soft soil surface, it's a recipe for problems.  Cart traffic on fairways and foot traffic on greens with such soft surfaces will create uneven putting surfaces and cause increased soil compaction - things that can be avoided if we wait just a little longer for things to firm up.

Today, we will start rolling and maybe even mowing the greens for the first time this year in hopes of opening soon.  Rolling should help firm up surfaces and hopefully smooth out any heaving issues over the winter.  With a good result, I am cautiously optimistic we will be in a position to open if the rain holds off.  Rain on top of the current soft conditions would likely make the place borderline unplayable.

In the meantime, our skeleton crew is busy cleaning, blowing, so as soon as the time is right we will be happy to open those floodgates.

See Thaw battle......

I hope you will pardon my month and a half hiatus from blogging.  I just couldn't bring myself to talk about the water project, painting ball washers, and the goings on at the shop anymore.  While I do enjoy writing the occasional snarky opinion piece in the winter, the traffic from the membership on my blog was down so I figured you were sick of me too.  However, with the snow and ice finally melted, we are all beginning to twitch with anticipation for the golf season to begin.

I have thoroughly surveilled the course post-thaw and I can say that overall it is in good shape.  Not too much debris, a few trees blown over, but everything is mostly where we left it in the fall.  That being said, we are nowhere near where we need to be in order to open the proverbial floodgates.  There is still frost in the ground approximately 4-7 inches deep which is trapping moisture in the upper soil layer making the ground extremely soft.  Also, the turf is still mostly dormant and upcoming nighttime temps in the 20's will result in a shallow re-freeze of the ground.  I suspect we are at least a week or more from putting a mower on the golf course.  Once we get a good mowing or two, we will think about opening.  I would like to shoot for the week of the 30th, but it's up to Mother Nature.  We need more heat and continued dry weather.

One unusual sight this spring was a little winter damage on #16 green.  The valley in the rear of the green seems to have taken a little hit from ice coverage and extended water-logging.  I have never seen this green struggle like this before, but I believe it will grow out.  I will keep you posted as the spring continues if we need to do some seeding or need to close the green.  The plan for now is a cocktail of fertilizers and some heat to grow out of it.  It will be a slow recovery but I think it will ultimately be ok.  This is a great example of how low areas that hold water and ice longer are always at risk of health issues, especially when the predominant species of turf is Poa annua.  Also, we encountered an unusually high amount of deer damage especially on #6 green.

This is the back of #16 green.  It will be a slow recovery for the green, but if you look up close at these brown areas, I see a lot of green turf.  

This is a wider shot of 16 green.  You can see the water and some ice still standing.  This is the only green on the course still visibly holding water as of Monday the 16th.

In between some of the browned out area are these strange lines of green.  Curious as to what may cause that.

Number 6 was hit by a deer dance party.  Should grow out nicely, but unusually high amounts of winter traffic damage this year.

A look from a little farther back shows the amount of hoofprints.  Sorry about the crap photo.

A little gorgeous snow mold here and there as well.  All in fairways and rough and not enough to worry about.  What do you expect after another snow covered winter?

I have brought some crew back and we are starting to tackle tree work that was neglected in the fall due to the project on 14.  The 4-person crew will do tree work when possible as well as normal spring cleaning around the course.  Two trees on #15 remind us why species matters.  Sassafras to the left of #15 were leaning quite low and upon further inspection, rot was detected.  With such trashy (but lovely smelling) softwood trees, it is crucial to keep an eye on them especially when they lean and especially when multi-trunked and tending to trap moisture.  We had no idea how bad it was until we cut them down today.  These were good trees to remove for other reasons as well - they dropped a lot of debris into the bunkers and really offered no value to the left side of #15 other than shade and thin turf.  Good riddance.

And yes, we did find a golf ball stuck up in one of the trees.

Not much left holding up a fairly large tree.

Once the weather breaks, we have much to do to finish the projects on 14 and the driving range.  More on that once the water project gets buttoned up which I will cover in an upcoming post.  Hopefully, I will see you on the golf course soon!

Food for thought this coming spring

I was reading through the results of our recent member survey today and a couple of the open-ended comments reminded me of one of the annual problems we deal with each and every year.  Most notably in the springtime, our greens appear patchy and are often a little bumpy and slow especially in the afternoon hours.  Morning golfers will get great putting conditions while I have to listen to the afternoon guys tell me how rotten the greens were.  Below is a link to a USGA article explaining this in their "Fore the Golfer" section.  I will summarize the article in the next paragraph and then I think I fancy a bit of a "rant".

What is important to remember is that our older greens consist of not only two types of turf - bentgrass and Poa annua - but also many different biotypes within those species.  As greens age, environmental pressures, stresses and natural processes segregate into many different strains across a putting surface.  All of these strains behave differently throughout the seasons and even the time of day to result in inconsistent conditions that can negatively affect ball roll.  In the springtime, all of these different biotypes are coming out of winter with different carbohydrate reserves, seeding rates, growth rates etc and it can be impossible to foresee exactly what to do to get good putting conditions.  Everyone comments how their lawns take off in the spring and they can't keep up with the mowing, but somehow if that happens on greens they don't seem to understand.  Yes we apply growth regulators religiously to combat that as much as possible, but Mother Nature can ignore those if she choses.  As turf managers, the best we can do with Poa annua is keep watching, trying different growth regulator cocktails and react as best we can with cultural practices to make the greens as good as possible day to day.

Now let's begin the rant - Usually, by the end of May into June, these growth patterns tend to steady and seedheads begin to disappear making things much smoother and in turn faster.  This is the reason the greens progressively get better and faster right up to the first week of July, which makes people think I just do it for the LPGA (paraphrased from survey comment).  I assure you our department does as much as possible within the financial resources and weather provided us to make the course as good as possible each and every day.  Do you really think we want the greens bumpy and slow?  Do you think I want to listen to the afternoon players moan and complain?  Would you deliberately create less than perfect results for your boss if you had the choice to do otherwise?  Think about it.  Also consider when you go to other courses, the makeup of their greens, the microclimates, the soils, the way they've been maintained for the last 80 years are all different so your comparison of our greens to theirs quite frankly means about jack and squat to me.  Trust me - we superintendents are a tight bunch - when we hear how great X's greens are we usually call each other about it and guess what - it's a perception problem that I will likely rant about in a future article.  (END OF RANT)

As always this spring, we will try some different things this year to keep improving spring conditions and I hope my rantings and the USGA Green Section article below will be of help to generate a little more understanding.

Cheers!

USGA - Patchy and Bumpy greens - click here

Happy New Year!  2015 is off and running and the course is perfectly nestled under a layer of snow.  The Grounds Department staff (what's left of it) is busily preparing equipment, course accessories, budgets, and their brains for another great season.  As you can imagine, there's not many things that may be of interest to the golfer happening right now.  The construction and electrical work are almost finished in our new Range House/Pump Station.   As much as a photo of a light switch may be good news to me, I'm sure you can use your imagination.  In fact, as of today, the most interesting thing I can document is that we just finished sand-blasting and repainting all of our course ball washers.  We have painted them black instead of the traditional "1960's country club green".  A slightly new look for 2015 that will tie in better with our new upscale accessories we put on the range last year.  We are also standardizing the height and making several repairs so they work a little better for us.

We are trying to renovate our accessories to better tie into the upgraded accessories we purchased for the range last year.  As I like to call it the "1960's country club green" just seems a bit outdated and not quite as upscale.  Look for more blacks and browns to tie everything together.

Aside from the fascinating world of ball washers, I did happen across a really nice article from the USGA about winter play, frost delays, frozen greens and other issues we deal with every fall/winter.  I took some heat this past fall for leaving the golf course closed on several occasions due to freezing/thawing/winter conditions.  The below article from the USGA explains everything in nice detail.  If only they had posted it last fall when people were giving me grief!

Click Here for USGA Article on Winter/Cold Weather Play

I hope 2015 has started out as well for you as it has for me.  I am exciting to begin my 11th season at Highland Meadows.  April 16th will be my 10-year anniversary and I am looking forward to many more.

Cheers!