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!