Early August Notes

It's Invitational Week... Here's a (quick) note...

What's different about this picture?
a. the fountains are not on
b. no flagstick or pin on the green
c. half the green looks to be darker than the other
d. the blue sky looks photo shopped
e. it's a bird, no a plane, rather just some storm damage in the woods (sometimes they fall where you'd prefer they fall... yikes)
answer: all of the above!

Early August Notes:
The repairs on #11 Approach are coming along nicely.  You may ask, what happened?  Well, as I've become aware of, the course has this phenomenon of having old abandoned irrigation pipes every so often heave/stick out of the ground.  This happened to be the case on #11 approach which happened to cross the entire fairway. :(  Our team decided to pull it out of the ground as it was only 2.5-3" below ground and as evidence (pic 4), the old pipe was also receiving some aerification holes from past years aerifications.  As a result, we wanted to take it out on #11 so that we don't have equipment problems on that area anymore.  Unfortunately, the sod we took off didn't cut well so we ended up using some sod from our turfgrass nursery.  We purposely "crowned" the area as we know it will settle given the pipe that was in their originally.  We plan to fully fix it this coming fall if we need to slightly adjust it.

New Mower and Triflex Demo...
Late in July, we were lucky to demo (try) two newer technologies that would be useful here in the future. The first item was what we call a triflex.  This unit is a precision riding greensmower that would allow us to continue mowing the greens to the highest standards when our labor market is low due to team members going to school in the spring and fall.  The other nice advantage to the unit is that we can schedule a "second" mow to the greens during peak months to give those greens a finer buzz.

www.toro.com

The other unit we tried out was Toro's brand new "fixed" greensmower.  We were the first course in the state of WI to try out the mower.  We are the premier Club to beta-test brand new technology, we'll take it.  Regardless, it was nice to see the newest greensmower on the market and if this unit would work at OGC.  Overall, it was a user friendly mower and one that would work great here at the Club.

Sorry Mark Robel (Equip Sales for Reinders... You made the Blog...)

Over the month of July, we casually had a few members ask what Joel, Mike, or I were doing on the Greens with this "Pogo" looking stick.  What it is called is, a moisture meter...  The moisture meter allows us to determine the water content in the soil at a fixed depth.  Once the moisture content is calibrated to what we are targeting, then you could send any other team members to use and water based on what readings they are getting.  Effectively, this tool allows us to Micro-climate (micromanage) the greens and add water to areas that need it and areas that don't.

During the last week of July, our team was able to apply sand to some key locations on the course and hope to continue to do so in August as well.  We targeted topdressing some fairways, fairway landing zones, and tees on the course.  Unfortunately, we weren't able to do these practices on a Monday, as our event calendar has been booked since June for Mondays.  Ideally, having two Mondays a month would avoid having these practices done during normal golf play.  Pictured below, shows the before/after sand being applied to #13 fairway.  We topdress the entire fairway as this fairway is the "worst" drained fairway on the course.  By adding sand over the years, we should be able to improve the drainage or at least not make it worse :)

This month, we had a first for me.  A motorized handicap golf caddie (cart).  This unit allowed someone to play/swing the golf club.  I was a bit worried about the unit on the greens but the operator that was using this on Monday, formerly worked on golf courses and knew to be extra careful turning and moving on the greens. 

The night of August 5th, the course was hit with a storm.  We ended up losing a few big branches and 2 entire trees on the property.  The pic below is from a tree between 9 and 10 that lost a good sized branch, the middle picture is just a Norway maple that has girdled roots and rapidly dying off.  The bottom picture is a tree that fell on that night of August 5th from the base.  Pretty wild to see the tree break off right at the ground level.

Lastly, we are keeping an eye on this strange line on #6 green.  At this point we are unsure what caused this discoloration/line as we don't know if it was self inflicted as it doesn't seem like a natural disease.