June is over and the rain has finally stopped. We recorded a whopping 14 + inches of rain for the month. The course has dried nicely with this weeks warm, arid weather. Currently we have some areas of the course which are still quite wet while other areas are becoming fairly dry. The wet ares are locations where sub- surface ground water continues to be shed from the property. The disparity in moisture conditions makes the task of watering the course more difficult.
You will notice that some turf turned from deep green to brown very quickly. We attribute this condition to two causes. First, our turf actually loses roots when rain continues to saturate over a period of several weeks- once the rain stops the turf is "shocked" when it actually has to "work" for water. The second cause of the brown turf in the rough is because of cart traffic on the stressed turf. The brown turf is primarily being experienced in the rough and will recover with time.
The nice weather has allowed us to improve the condition of the bunkers. The bunker on hole 17 was nearly destroyed by the 4 inches of rain we received last weekend.
Rushing water washed the sand away exposing the drainage pipes. We determined all of the sand had to be replaced because of extensive contamination with gravel.
We were able to use our Bobcat skid loader to remove the bulk of the old, contaminated sand.
The old sand was not wasted. We used this sand to fill the bunkers on the driving range and lower 2. This will be an improvement in aesthetics to these areas.
We determined that some of the drainage piping was actually damaged so we extracted bad areas and repaired the drain while we had all the sand removed. We will continue the description of our repairs in the next blog post...
