Swamped

Last night we got another 1.5" of rain. We have closed the course this morning. We are probably going to open after lunch for any brave people who want to strap on the galoshes and try to play. Tomorrow morning we will concentrate all of our man power into fixing the green side bunkers. They have held up extremely well, but with so much rain, there is some standing water and some washed areas. We will have these in shape tomorrow for the sunny day. Sorry for the inconvenience, but when you are dealing with Mother Nature, you play with the hand she deals you.

Turf Bubble

Some of the golfers from yesterday reported seeing "an unstable bubble" in the middle of #14 fairway. This was caused by a broken irrigation line. When the line is leaking, but not completely broken, the water will not always break the surface. It will cause what we call a turf bubble. Once we see these, we have to locate the area where the pipe is leaking and fix the leak. Thank you for reporting this and especially thank you for not driving over it.

Super Soaked

We got 1.25" of rain last night. If you add this to the 4.2" we have had over the last 14 days, all of this water is just sitting there. The ground is fully saturated and the rain has nowhere to go. There is standing water on the tees and fairways. With more rain on the way, we will be on the mats on the range all weekend.

Dormant Dragging

Today we are dragging our fairways with a steel drag mat.  With another wet front approaching we decided to go ahead and drag the fairways and intermediate cuts. Once the fairway is dragged it was blown off by a tractor blower. We were hoping to remove as much loose matter as possible so if heavy rain did fall we wouldn't get loose debris streaks that usually occur after heavy rain.  This also fluffs up the bermuda, so we will be out this week mowing the fairways and intermediate cuts.

This is the drag in use.

This is the steel drag we are using

This is the tractor blower blowing the loose debris after dragging

New look

Today we are putting our new flags out. We have adopted the red, white, and blue flag method. The red flags indicate a front pin placement, white means middle, and a blue flag shows a back pin. We hope you like the new system and the new flags. We think they turned out great.

Call it a wash...

As of lunch time on Monday, we have received right at 2" of rain. This has caused the course to be EXTREMELY wet. There is more standing water in fairways than I can remember in the last 3 years. We even had some ponds overflow. The pond on 3 & 4 overflowed and flooded the area behind 7 green and the pond on 8 left a raging river going over the spillway.

Plugging Away...

We have been putting a few plugs on some greens in the few weak areas we had around some of our edges.  This is a tedious process that has to be done perfect.  The first thing we do is take some hexagon shaped plugs from a nursery green.

After we have the fresh plugs, we cut hex plugs out of the bad areas on the green that need to be replaced.

After the bad area is cut out, we replace it with the new hex plugs.

Once the new plugs are in, we top dress the area with green sand.  After everything is perfectly level and topdressed, we roll and water the plugs.

Plugging areas usually has better long term results than sod.  The reason for this is, with plugs, we are able to get a larger amount of the root system.  With sod the roots are cut very shallow and the turf seems to struggle more in the summer.  Even though it is a little more tedious to work with hex plugs, it will be better in the long run.

Greens aerification

Some one asked about our schedule for greens aerification. Here are the dates for our cluster for this spring (dates may change due to inclement weather)

Georgia National - March 12&13
Heron Bay - April 29&30
Sun City - May 6&7
River Forest - March 25&26
Healy Point - May 28

Picture from this morning

This morning we had an extremely heavy fog. It was tough to play and work, but it did allow for a good picture or two.

Lines, lines, everywhere there's lines...

We have started painting our fairway edges. You will see blue paint lines marking our edges for our fairway cuts. You may notice a few minor changes. In some areas we enlarged the fairways. We also had to bring some edges in closer in other areas. The main reason for the shrinking of some of these areas has to do with high traffic coupled with shade issues. The shade and traffic has caused the turf in these areas to become weaker. By us being proactive in raising the mowing heights, these areas should perform better this year. We will also have to really patrol the traffic in these areas as well. We didn't bring in very many areas and we tried not to have to do it in any landing areas.
It may seem a little early to be doing this, but we will be mowing grass sooner than you realize. We are also adding an intermediate rough cut around all greens this year instead of stopping it in the approaches. We hope these changes will make for a better round of golf.

Start stepping...

The steps on #18 tee box are ready for use. We still have to landscape around them to finish off the project, but they are ready for traffic. The project was headed up by two of our long time employees. Timoteo (left) and Jose (right) took on the project and did a majority of the work while the rest of the crew helped out as well. We hope these help to access the tee box easier.

Picture of the day.

There was a beautiful sunrise this morning. I was going past #11 green and had to stop and take this picture. It is looking over the pond and #10 green. Views like this really make you appreciate working outside.

Tee Management

We take great pride in our tee box management. One employee goes above and beyond in this area of tee management. Michael "Limey" Hughes is our tee manager. He is the guy who goes the extra mile to clean every tee marker, fill and sanitize the ball washers, fill and level all divots, and even pick up every broken tee. It's this above and beyond attitude that makes our course look that much cleaner from the tee boxes.
He also sets up our practice tee areas and makes sure everything is as straight as possible. Right now we are only hitting from the grass on Friday through Sunday. The reason behind this is to conserve enough area to get us through the winter and spring until the grass starts to grow back in to fill the divots. The rye grass will not fill the divots, so we have to wait until the Bermuda starts to grow again to fill in the voids. As the weather warms up, we will be on the grass more often. Thanks for your patience with us on this.