QUESTIONS ABOUT WATER

I understand some of you have asked questions about water running on the course last week.  I will explain our decision to water and why we had a sprinkler running on 12 for many hours.

WHY DID WE CHOOSE TO WATER?
We chose to charge our irrigation system last week due to the extreme dry conditions we were seeing on our greens.  Our greens are constructed of sand.  The sand has very little water holding capacity so it dries out very quickly.  We felt we were potentially going to see turf damage if we didn't water.  We saw moisture readings in the single digits with our moisture meters and we know that is a dangerous zone for Bentgrass.

WHY DID A SPRINKLER HEAD STICK ON FOR HOURS?
We have over 1000 sprinkler heads on the course.  During normal conditions we are able to predict how our sprinkler heads operate.  With the extreme cold temperatures that the irrigation system has been exposed to this winter, some of the small valves in the sprinkler heads are frozen.  This doesn't allow us to have control over that head.  We noticed that a sprinkler head on 1 and a sprinkler head on 12 stuck on when we charged the system.  We were able to valve 1 off immediateley, but 12 is in a spot that we were not able to isolate, also the head on 12 is in the native so it had no negative effect on the playability of the course during the watering window that we needed to water all of the greens and tees.

Thank you for your continued support of our goals to make Staley Farms the best golf course in Kansas City.    

MOWING GREENS

The weather is beautiful.  We chose to mow our greens today.  They are completely thawed out and we want to give you a great putting surface during this strange stretch of weather we are going to have this week.  We will roll them next Tuesday also to keep them rolling nice during the great golf weather.  We also cut all of the cups today so we will be able to rotate to new pins all this week.

ENJOY:)

DRY CONDITIONS

We have been monitoring our greens with moisture meters and the greens have dropped below our moisture threshold.

We watered this morning. We will water for three days and then shut the system back down.

It is time consuming to charge the irrigation system but we didn't have a choice. The moisture meters tell us when to water and we rely on the data to plan our watering schedule.