The Preparation Starts

For what you may ask? Every superintendent's favorite time of the year of course; aeration. We start aerating the ninth of this month (you won't be affected until the 10th), but we start our pre-fertilization program now. The idea is to get the grass growing right now so as soon as we get the holes in the green, they will already be in recovery mode. The extra growth makes them slower obviously, but who wants to look at holes filled with sand!?

We have also aerated the collars around the greens. With our new strategy of blowing the sand into the holes vs. dragging the sand we end up with a lot of sand on the edges of the greens. With the holes in the collar, the extra sand now has a home to go to.

If you want to see what they will be like two weeks later, come check out the practice greens. They have responded wonderfully and they are rolling well.

Interesting Morning

I came into work today to discover that the irrigation failed to run the prior night. Come to find out that an owl had flown into PG&E's power lines and knocked out power to half of the course. Haven't heard that one before and hopefully won't hear it again!

Irritation Season

Oops. I meant to say irrigation season. Must have been a Freudian slip. Now that we have finally reached the full time irrigation season, things are busier than ever. We have had a lot of issues with our irrigation controllers this year which have occupied most of my blogging time. We have 64 irrigation controllers on the golf course. Any one of the components can go bad and there is no real logic as to determining which component is bad.

Aside from the controllers going bad, we have had many issues with the ground wires. Every sprinkler has a ground wire and with our sprinklers covering 200+ acres, that is a lot of ground wire. Tracking down where the wire is bad has been challenging to say the least. Luckily it has been a relatively mild summer to date!

4 Canyon Pond

As many have noticed, the pond on 4 canyon has turned red! What that is is a floating pond plant called Azolla Caroliniana (pictured right) or commonly referred to as red fern, water fern, or fairy moss. I refer to it as the red sea. Some may remember that we had this same problem on number 2 canyon a few years back.

Azolla typically comes in via a duck or other water fowl when the plant gets stuck on their body. From there, the weed multiplies faster than rabbits! It took two weeks for that pond to get covered which is lightning quick.

The best way of managing it initially is chemically. The best product to use would be Sonar followed by Reward. From there, nutrient management is key. That can be accomplished by adding aerators under the surface to get pond circulation. The problem for us is that we don't have power out that way to do that. We are looking in to having Clean Lakes do a Sonar application, but it is very pricy. For now, we'll have to enjoy the nice contrast between green and Cinnabar Red.

8 Lake Drop Zone

After constructing a new drop zone on 8 lake over the winter with cores from tees and fairways, we have now opened it. It should be a little more level than the previous drop zone, but, as the picture illustrates, will still be daunting when the pin is middle or left.