Losing a valued team member

I feel I need to announce this on the blog, as many of you know Adam personally - Adam Bateson, after 15 years of service at FCC, is moving on to pursue another career path.  His last day will be August 14, if you get the chance to thank him and wish him well, please do.

We will miss his strong work ethic and ability to get things done.

Adam was in the role of Assistant Superintendent for many of his 15 years here.

Rain totals

No pictures in this post - you've seen them all already, still squeegeeing and spiking greens.

 

In the last 11 days the course has seen 6.4" of rain.

In the last 50 days the course has seen 17".

The current wet trend started on May 29 and we've had very few breaks since then.  Tomorrow, more rain will add to our totals.

 

With this heat and humidity, disease pressure is really high.  We sprayed all the playing surfaces on Thursday with a preventive application, finishing up at 10:00pm.  I feel confident that we will fair well.  With that said, we will still see some turf loss in low lying areas that hold water.  In those areas the pressure is just too high and the turf will not be able to withstand the added water and heat.

 

We continue to spike greens as needed to bring oxygen into the soil.  We also raised mowing heights to reduce scalping, and decreased rolling to alleviate added pressure.  When the wet trend snaps, we will be back to normal.

 

The latest storm on Friday night made a mess of our bunkers, we will be repairing them on Monday.  There was a scheduled outing on Monday which has been moved to August 10.



You know what this post is about....

As it continues to rain, our focus moves from keeping the course 'playable' to keeping the course 'alive'.  We were supposed to hold the U of F golf outing today, but rescheduled it due to saturated course conditions and a bad weather outlook.  Our main concern are greens 10 and 18, these two greens in particular hold water more than the others.  Currently, they are saturated pools of mush; allowing that amount of foot traffic on them for an outing might be the end of them.

To combat the saturated soils and lack of oxygen, we have been aerifying the greens, especially 10 and 18, on a regular basis.  We have also limited mowing and rolling to reduce stress as much as possible.

A few areas in the fairways have also been aerified.

Squeegeeing the fairways is becoming a daily routine - attempting to clear the water off as soon as possible.  We have been lucky in the sense that we have not had a lot of sun and high temperatures.  If we had these rains followed be heat and sun, we would have seen a lot more turf loss.

We are stuck between a rock and a hard place on mowing - if we don't mow today, the next driest day will most likely be Thursday by then the grass will be horrendously long, it already is.  If we mow today we are going to pull up mud and the course is going to look like trash.  So, some areas we mowed, some we didn't.  The rule is: if it's just a mud track, go ahead and mow it; but if you're leaving ruts, don't mow it.  Tracks are temporary, ruts are hard to get out.

 

2.2" of rain

Over the last 36 hours we've seen 2.2" of rain, leaving the course saturated this morning.

View of the range tee first thing this morning.

Bunkers were full.

1 fairway

The rain didn't keep us from doing routine maintenance and some house cleaning.

It gave us a great opportunity to clean out the barn...

and give all the equipment a good scrubbing.

Small projects

We are getting into a few small projects around the course as time opens up for us.  Besides putting a hurt on our weed population, we are also: 

Edging cart paths

Repairing irrigation heads

and Trimming trees.

 

We will try to accomplish as much as we can in the next 45 days in between normal maintenance and outing preparations.  In a month and a half from now, half of our staff goes back to school and small projects become low on the priority list.

Repairing flood damage

With a week of no rain, we have dried down enough to begin repairing the damage from the recent flooding.  We laid seed down on 18 and 8, grass will be germinating after a few days.

The fairway spots that needed seeding were verticut first to establish a good seed bed, then seeded.

We slit seeded any rough that was bare.

Another project we tackled was checking sand depths in the bunkers and adding where needed.

Squirrel!

Lunch with BVC

We had the privilege of spending time with our friends from Blanchard Valley Center today over lunch.

One of our vendors - Bruce Wotring, joined us and supplied the meat and did the grilling.  He's joined by Eric and Jeff on the left.

Evan joined our guests Dustin and Keith.

 

Zach enjoyed the company of Sonja and Bill.

Also visiting was Nichole, Molly and Brooke

Jeff convinced us to take him for a ride out on the course, he wanted to get his picture taken by the front sign.

Here's the whole crew.  After an enjoyable lunch together, we gave them a small token of our appreciation - a new logoed golf ball, and a small ride around the course. 

 

Thank you BVC for a great partnership!

3.2" of rain

We saw rain for 34 straight hours, from 4:00pm Friday until 2:00am Sunday, with only a few short breaks in that span.  In total, the course received 3.2"

The river came out of its banks yet again.

Bunkers were washed out and were repaired today.

Along with the rain, we also saw plenty of wind.  The course is littered with debris, most of which will be picked up tomorrow. 

 

Still raining

1.9" of rain last night and into this morning. 

Damage assessment

The damage from the recent flood is not bad considering how long some areas were under water and how warm it was.

18 approach, along the creek on 18, and a few small areas on 8 lost grass.  We put seed down on the worst areas today, within a few weeks we will be back to green and healing.

Besides the normal mowing routines and flood clean-up, we focus on the details of the golf course during the summer months - string trimming, edging sprinkler heads and tee plaques, edging bunkers, cleaning cart paths, trimming trees and spraying weeds.

In preparation for the July 4th fireworks, we had the tall grass cut down in the field south of 8 fairway.

Flood damage

In celebration of US Open weekend, we decided to go "brown" here at FCC.

The flood waters on 8, 9 and 18 have receded, leaving us a silt covered course.

Larger puddles were removed from the course this morning, what's left will slowly drain away.  Any debris was also cleaned up. The silt on the turf will soon dry and get mown off.  I expect minimal turf loss due to this flood - a little on 8 and 18. 

 

All holes are open this weekend, barring anymore rain.  Cart traffic will be limited on 8 and 18.

Flooding

As I am writing this, we are flooded and rain continues to fall.  1, 8, 9, and 18 are unplayable, carts have been restricted and the range has been closed for the last few days because of standing water and soggy conditions.  We are mowing what we can, spiking greens when needed and will be pulling the irrigation pumps from their perch shortly.

In preparation for the flooding, everything that could possibly float away was removed from the area.

Currently, 8 and 9 are underwater, 18 is mostly covered.

 

8 green is half under as of this morning.

A deadly disease - Pythium - showed is ugly head yesterday.  This disease spreads quickly and is typically spread through the movement of water - ouch!  Good thing we sprayed a preventive fungicide application yesterday on all the fairways, we should be protected but may see some breakthrough due to the high pressure.

 

Choking greens

With all the rain and humidity we've had recently, the greens have started turning an orange color.  When that happens, we know that the turf isn't getting the oxygen it needs.

10 and 18 are usually the worst, they tend to hold water more than the other greens.

When the turf needs oxygen, the best way to remedy this is to aerify.  Today we solid tined all the greens, let them breathe for a few hours, then rolled them smooth for this afternoon's play.  With the extended forecast showing little change, I would expect we will do this again next week. 

Drainage project

A sink hole developed near 2 green over the past few months.  This week we dug up the problem area and found 4 tiles that were broken and needed to be replaced.

A project like this is always bigger than it may appear - a small sink hole turned into a large drainage repair.  Wayne and Mat did a great job digging it up and fitting in a new pipe.  We attempted to finish this up on Friday afternoon but was called off the course at 2:00 due to the large storm that moved through.  This project will be buttoned up early next week.

Landscape project

This week we completed a small landscape project along the tennis court fence, adding a little more color and definition to the area.

Eric laid out 24 ornamental grasses and also planted numerous hostas and flowering perennials.

This finished project turned out great.  Thanks to all the members that donated funds for these plants, (left over funds donated in honor of Cheryl Wenner).