March Madness

Not all March Madness appears on the basketball court as the NCAA tournament has kicked off.  Although my brackets are not quite shot, I have to say my favorite remark about the tournament so far is from sports reporter Holly Rowe @sportsiren who twitted "Dear Neighbors, please don't call the fire department.  It's just me lighting my bracket on fire.  It'll burn out in a moment, like all my picks"

March madness this year occurred on the golf course in February, the 22nd to be exact.  That is when we started seeing the Forsythia start blooming. This was the earliest I remember seeing this occur.  While out sick last year during this time, I was able to go back in my notes for the previous 4 years, finding the normal time for Forsythia to bloom at our course was around the 15th, while one year it was the first week of March. 

While we use a lot of tools to help us make decisions on applications, such as soil temperatures, growing degree days, and such, using plants as indicators is still popular and useful.  This is always a good indicator to apply pre-emergent products.  We usually will start making those applications at this time, but we do look at a larger window, since we make split applications and this early one is more for crabgrass and poa.  Since we will make herbicide applications to remove cool season grasses from our Bermuda fairways, and we don't have much of a crabgrass problem, the timing isn't as critical.  We do have some goosegrass problems, so the timing of the second applications is more critical for us.    

We will normally use Round-up at a light rate of 32 oz. per acre on warmer days during March to start cleaning the fairways of poa, but it doesn't do much for our rye grass clumps.  But since we saw green up so early this year on the Bermuda, I skipped that application and went straight to Monument at the 10 gram per acre rate.  My first application was this past Monday, by Friday I was seeing some effect on some poa.  We were able to spray all fairways and all but 3 tees.  I also avoided the Round-up due to the many comments I've heard from fellow superintendents about the delay of the Bermuda breaking dormancy when using Round-up (of course it is on the label as well).  Our fairways always have had slow starts.  I certainly did not want to set them back after the green up we saw.  

As the pictures below show, the green up was on our Quickstand Bermuda and the dormant Bermuda that you see appears to be common.  I don't know why we have seen common dominate in that location, my only guess is that is where a lot of cart traffic is and there is more compaction.  This is also an area we do see a lot of goosegrass, which is usually an indicator of compaction as well.  There in the back ground, is zoysia in the approach and collar, with a bent grass green.  I hope to have a story about that in the near future.   

Some other work we did this week was pressurize the irrigation system and checking all heads and control boxes.  Besides one leak and having to  replace one station control board, the system is looking good so far.  I plan on having some more updates about our irrigation system in my next post.

Thanks again for reading!

Mel  

Final Winter Projects as Spring Break Ends

As Spring Break ends, the boy is safely back at school waiting to pick up his friends at the train station.  He had a successful spring break beating the heck out of us at Monopoly.  He also visited with his former high school classmates and we all took in watching his alma mater perform their winter percussion show.  He misses those days when he was in it. 

While at work we had finished up some of our final winter projects.  Such as cutting down the native grass plants, opening up the on course restrooms, reorganizing the shop areas, attending educational events,  starting the pump station, and many others things. 

 One of our bigger projects every winter is cleaning, painting and rebuilding our ball washers.  We had grown a little tired of the green paint, so we were going through some of our paint cans we had on our shelves and found a great looking Royal Blue. After painting that first ball washer, we found we didn't have enough paint for all of the ball washers but when I went to the hardware store we had found that color had been discontinued by that manufacture, and we had already thrown out the old can, so we couldn't take it to match. We tried another brand of Royal Blue that we had used for some other items, but it wasn't even close to that beautiful blue we had found first.  Our solution was we took one of our golf flags and had the color matched.  The end result was what you see on the right.  Personally I would love to move back to the nostalgic red ones of my youth, but for now we will stick with this color.  We did already receive a compliment on them.

Another project was to paint our Jr. Kids markers, which consist of landscape ties painted.  A couple of years ago we made the following tee markers for our Jr. markers, we have both the Level 1 and Level 2 US Kids  Golf Family Markers.  They do get used when our Pro gives Jr. lessons, runs a lesson/league, during our Jr. Tournaments for the youngest of kids, and last year they were used during our inaugural season with our PGA Jr. League season.  This year our Pro is hoping to have two teams.  In an effort to improve one of our par 3 for the kids by adding a new tee to fit the yardage recommended. 

   
This was the permanent tee markers the guys made a couple of seasons ago.  They stay out all season long, the post we put out when the kids get out of school. 

Well spring has sprung and we have a to do list longer then my arm.  Hopefully I can share some of our accomplishments we have this next week.

Thanks for reading!

Mel

Yardage Markers

Below I have pictured a typical winter indoor project consisting of our yardage plates on our par 3 tees.  When I first arrived at my current facility we did not have any indicators with the exception of a few irrigation heads of what the actual yardage was.  I noticed this discrepancy the first time I played the course, as I stood on the tees trying to guess where the yardage shown on the card was.  Club selection for me is tough enough, standing partially blind did not give me the confidence to play the shot.  Before I go on, I will admit, I probably shouldn't worry that much about the yardage, I'm a 12 handicap, but if I didn't know the exact yardage, what about our better players.  Another note, we cater to mostly senior golfers who are out more for exercise and fun, but we do host some school events, and really the cost for these are minimal.  $1.40 for the block, with paint and labor, we might have $10 wrapped up in each one.  We decided to add the actual yardage, for two reasons, I played another course regularly, and on one of their par 3's that was in the 200 yard range.  They had a blue plate on their tee, but I could not figure if it was 200 yards from the plate or was it the 210 that was listed on the score card?  Also our yardages were measured from the back of our teeing grounds and some of those areas had settled and shrunk, so we used a measuring device and painted the actual yardage from the spot we placed the plate.    

Also when I started here, we did have a plate for our 150 yard from the green marked but not a 100 yards out, or 200 yards out on our par 5's and our 1 long par 4.  We bought patio blocks, painted them the standard red, white, and blue and placed them in the middle of our fairways.  We also added painted 4x4 posts on each side of the fairways since the block isn't always visible from the rough, where my ball usually is.  While a little bit of a pain having to move them when mowing, I sure didn't want to place a post or stake in the middle of the fairway.  I always say, if I ever am lucky enough to hit a drive down the middle of the fairway and it hits a stake that stops it, or knocks it into the rough, I'm using that stake to beat someone with.

We also have irrigation heads with yardage tags on them as my next picture shows.  We will be replacing some of those that are missing with the actual yardage engraved into the sprinkler head top.  We need to replace many lids (tops) anyway, this will serve two purposes.

We do all of this even though since my start here we have added GPS units to our carts.  I still believe in keeping the course marked for yardage for those people that walk all the time, especially the juniors/schools when they have tournaments. 

So when did all this preoccupation with yardages really come into play?  I started playing when I was 9 years old, I really didn't need precise yardages.  I remember the course I grew up on, our 150 markers were Arborvitae bushes.  I was still hitting my Northwestern Chi Chi Rodriguez 2 wood from there.  I don't think it was until I had graduated to my set of McGregor DX's women's clubs that I started having to pay a little attention to yardages.  I don't even remember much in high school if I had yardages dialed in yet, but I think it was at that time when I learned my Lynx (pre Black Cat days) 7 iron was my 150 club.  I had to hit the perfect wedge for 100 yards, and my 3 iron was 200 yards.  I still did not really get at exact yardages yet, as an example, I was working at a course with my mom and dad, and was able to play everyday at about 4 PM, when the regular summer Florida rains had chased people off the course and I would hit the first tee.  More often then not, I would hit my drive, go put driver in the bag and grabbed my club for the next shot.  I guess that was the benefit of playing that course everyday. 

After I graduated from Lake City, I still worked at many courses around that time that was lucky to have a yardage blocks, no yardages on heads, or no GPS units yet.  It was at that time I started dialing my yardages in better, so I started stepping off my yardages more, probably becoming a slower player.  It wasn't until I worked at a NAIA university course that I really wanted more information.  I was the beneficiary of a new irrigation system and our pro asked me about getting yardage tags for the heads.  With college golfers (before they could use measuring devices) we thought it was imperative to provide information so they could play their best rounds.  We also included pin sheets for them, which showed depths of greens.  For the first time I really paid attention to that aspect as well.  It did help as that was about the time I was able to play more consistent rounds.  Ever since that time I have tried to provide as much information to help golfers play their best. 

I do remember one funny story from getting our yardages for heads, on the par 5's I would measure the heads to about 270 yards from the green.  Our pro asked why I did that, these par 5's were not very long, and he and our students would never need those yardage figures since they drove the ball so long, but I told him they come in handy for me, I know what club I needed to lay up with.    

I'm curious of what all yardage tools your course uses for golfers to play their best and also invite you to share your memories of learning when and how you dialed your yardages in?     

Thanks for reading!