Winter Projects

 Winter projects have been moving along with plenty more left to do. Several struggling/ dead trees and been removed from the property with more to follow. We have year old fire wood that has been split and stacked creating more room for this years wood. Firewood will be sold here at the maintenance shop for $100 a bed load and will negotiate a price if you dont need that much. The money made off the firewood will be used to buy apparel for the maintenance staff such as rain gear, work boots winter coats etc.  

The maintenance team really appreciates when members fill their divots and to help facilitate that even more we have built stands for members to swap empty sand bottles with full bottles. These racks will be placed up at the practice facility and as you cross the street headed to 10 tee. We also encourage re filling your bottles on two and five tees as well as one 13 and 16 tees. 

The winter we have also acquired a CoreMax 48. The coremax attaches to our current Toro 648 (the machine that punches our greens) and allows us to collect cores pulled from the green. The greens here have not had cores pulled from them in several years. In the past these greens have simply been punched with solid tines. By just punching the greens it is not removing any organic material from the green. Just simply making a channel for the sand. Pulling cores removes organic material, helping relieve compaction in the green as well as creates channels for sand were air and water can infiltrate the green. Pulling cores is a labor intensive job and what has deterred previous superintendents from pulling cores here in the past. There are several mechanical options out there to help collect and pick up cores however with how undulated our greens are they would not be a fit for our property and could possibly do more harm to the greens. I am excited to put the coremax to use this coming spring. The design and construction of the coremax makes it usable property and excited to improve turf health and play-ability. 

Mentioning turf health and play-ability we have received approval for new irrigation controllers. The previous controllers are over 20 years old and have been a struggle to keep running the last several years. When the controllers were put in there were zero houses on property. Now with a constantly growing community the radios that service the controllers are unable to do their job. I had the property surveyed this fall for a new system and to verify we could continue using radio frequency rather than run a control wire to all the boxes. With newer radio technology we will once again be able to connect to all our controllers out there. This new satellite system will also bring individual head control. Every head other than greens and some tee sprinkler heads are double, tripled and even quadrupled up. This can and has lead to over watering as well as under watering. Having single head control can allow me to adjust run times in for each individual irrigation head on the golf course. This coupled with the brand new pumps we obtained last fall will lead to a promising season coming up.