Big Hole Outing

Just a little over a week ago, our course tried something new.  Some history that lead to it, at our regular Ozark Turf Association Scholarship and Research Outings, we would have a large hole cut on one of the par 3's.  If we got in the game, we could play to that hole, which was near the front of the green, while the regular hole was on the back.  Not to say it was easy though, one year we had to use our mulligan to make birdie from about 10 feet.  We were left of the pin, and there was just enough of a slope to challenge us.  Another reason was some networking at the Orlando Golf Industry Show in 2017, there was a lot of talk about different ideas to encourage new play.  I decided to invest in a 9 hole set of 8" cups.  The cups themselves were pretty inexpensive, and worst case scenario, we could always use the cup cutter to repair greens if needed.  If I remember the investment was about $200 dollars.  This led to our course hosting a Big Hole Tournament.

When working with the Pro Shop on what holes to use the Big Holes, the first decision was since it was a small group, they wanted to do a reverse shotgun, starting on # 1 and working backwards to about #15.  We were concerned that on 4 holes on the front nine had soil greens and we weren't sure how hard it would be to cut holes in them, we did find them just as easy as on our USGA greens.  So we cut all of them on the front nine.  We did find one issue, with the breeze that day and the 7 1/2' flag poles, the edge of the cup would pull out slightly.  When the pin was removed, the cup sat just under the green surface.  I shared this issue on Twitter and it was suggested to use long nails in the drainage hole of the cup to hold the cup down.  We will give this a try before the next tournament.  

           


Once all play passed the big holes, two of our crew members removed the big cups and replaced the plug.  This allowed the course to be ready for the regular play that followed the Big Hole Tournament.  A lot of care had to be taken to replace the plug, extra greens mix had been removed because the cup cutter itself didn't quite cut deep enough.  They were able to replace the plugs in front of play with great results.  New cups were cut when the big hole was being cut as well, and then "capped" during play for the big hole.  the "cap" was removed and the hole ready for play.  The picture on the left shows the big plug replaced and leveled.

                
 

Players had a great time, and it was fun to watch how aggressive they were putting at the 8" cups.  Play itself was a two person scramble, with two putt maximum, so really aggressive putting should rule regardless of the holes with the regular sized cup or the big hole.  Another interesting stat was not all scores on the front nine with the big cups were the lowest.  The Big Hole tournament was something different and we will host it again in the future.

Thanks for reading!

Mel

Some new winter projects

With the early start to winter, and with the length of it, along with an additional full-timer, we were able to get our regular winter projects of ballwasher repairs and painting, yardage posts, tee markers, and other golf accessories done fairly early.  So what did we move onto to keep us busy?

Entrance signs:  We have an entrance sign, that upon closer inspection, had faded some after over 15 years.  I'm not sure when it was installed, but I've been here 15+ years.

We removed the sign and refurbished it.  The first picture on the left is after it received a good pressure washing.  and the next showed the process of painting the background.

                              

                               















These pictures show the sign after it had been painted.

Here is the sign reinstalled along with a new block bed that replaced the rotted out railroad tie bed that had surrounded the sign before.  We had it reinstalled just in time for this year's Masters Tournament.  This block bed was done by one of our Park's Operations crew.  They will be adding dirt and plant material in the near future.

 

The Horton Smith sign stood in front of our flagpole, after we had removed that sign, we found the standard park issue welcome sign, that was acting as the frame.  For some reason, I felt that sign had some historic significance and I wanted to display it in some manner. (also I'm cheap and hated just throwing it out),  We as a crew, decided to take ownership of it, we refinished it, and found a spot to display on our gate at our maintenance facility. The old rotting railroad tie bed can be seen in the picture on the left.    

We made note of some rotting railroad ties at the first tee, and one of our staff remembered some retaining wall block at another facility, that was not being used.  We gladly confiscated the block and the crew created a new retaining wall on our first tee.  This is probably one of our bigger projects we had taken on since I had been here.

 

We removed the rotten railroad ties, and a bed that was the bricks were used as a boarder.  Carts were always running into them and knocking them loose.  We removed that bed and the need for the brick border.  We installed the retaining wall block and finished the project with most cost just being labor.  We did have to buy 15 blocks to finish up the project, so the cost of materials was $63.00  The guys took ownership of all these projects.  I just suggested that we wanted to fix up what was there, and the guys took it from there.

I'm pretty proud of these guys, they always take pride and ownership of the many projects we do.

As always,

Thanks for reading!

Mel

Spring Training

Over the past few years, our Park's Operations Superintendent, (who is our employer's supervisor over the golf maintenance operations), has always promoted staff training.  We have trained on a variety of topics over the years, from chain saw and equipment safety, to preparing for hazardous weather events, tackling irrigation troubleshooting and auditing, and even fire safety, thanks to our city firefighters, (with some of these events, I can travel back and share at a later time).

This Spring was no exception, we had Matt Giese, from Syngenta come speak to our golf course maintenance staff, (we have three golf courses with 15 full time staff, 2 contract employees, and depending on the time of year, another 15 or so seasonal and part-timers).  Matt had previously spoke to our superintendent chapter about calibrating sprayers.  I checked with him to see if he could provide this same presentation to our staff, and he happily agreed to do that, along with helping us with spreader calibration.

              

Spreader calibrations we had already worked on the previous spring at my facility.  We have Andersons, and Scotts spreaders, (for the youngsters in the business, Scotts many years ago had sold much of their professional turf and golf line to The Andersons, including their spreaders), and having a couple of different models posed some concerns for us when using the spreader settings on the bags for our starting points.  So in 2018, we used the calibration tool that came with our Anderson's spreader and calibrated it and our two older R8-Scotts spreaders, (by the way, for some reason, the two spreaders the crew will grab first).  After we used the calibration tool, we set up all three spreaders with the same amount of fertilizer, and each of us spread that out on our 60 x 80 turf plots next to the shop.  All three put out the proper amount of fertilizer, so we knew they were adjusted properly.

              

   

What we really learned from Matt's presentation was fertilizer distribution.  Is the fertilizer or product being distributed evenly across the area we are applying it over.  Matt had as his tools for this part of the demonstration, was some rain gauges, and a fertilizer calibration tray system.

               

Scotts spreaders have a cone device under the hopper, to evenly distribute the fertilizer particles.  They will provide the proper cone setting on their products, but when it comes to using other products, we tend to guess.  I will usually check a similar Andersons product and go with their cone setting.

What we found out with the calibration testing, this cone setting doesn't always hold true.  We were using another brand of 25-0-5, with an SGN of 205, we used their setting of M on the bag, and we usually will use a cone 6.  After finding out that more product was distributed to the left of the spreader, we found a similar sized Andersons product with a cone setting of 4, that actually made the distribution pattern worse.  We went the other way to a cone 8, which is usually reserved for 125 -150 SGN sized particles and we came out with a more even distribution pattern.  Below on the left is the results of the first run, on the right, our third run.  We also learned the effective width of our pattern.  After we had concluded on our cone setting, Matt had measured out a test run, we weighed the material before putting it in the hopper, made our test pass, and then measured what was left in the hopper.  We found out our speader was still calibrated properly when it came to putting out the proper amount of product.

    

After our spreader calibration trials, we moved onto sprayer calibration work.  We started out making a test run over a measured area, to find out our miles per hour of the sprayer.  We measured our boom widths, our height of nozzles from the ground, and lastly we would collect water coming out of the nozzles in the time it took our sprayer to cover our measured area.  What we found out was the sprayer was putting out the correct amount of water, for the measured area.  (We were looking at 40 gallons per acre, and we were at 41 - 42 gallons of water per acre).

       

The one part of sprayer calibration we wouldn't able to really show was the nozzle spray     pattern because of the high winds of that day, (fertilizing calibration was done out of the wind behind our maintenance building.  Matt has some test paper that would show the spray pattern, but we were unable to test that.  We did make a test run on some asphalt and it showed a good pattern, with an even dry down on the pavement.

All in all, my staff enjoyed the presentation.  Much thanks goes to Matt and Syngenta for supplying pitchers and rain gauges for measuring our products.  We were reminded the importance of calibrating our equipment, and found that ours was still adjusted properly.  

Storm Damage

Time as slipped by these past weeks, as staff has started leaving or working less hours as they head back to school, family obligations, such as, Dr. Appointments (eye and dentist), school shopping, a quick 3 day vacation to Indianapolis for Drum Corp prelims, and helping the move back to school, projects getting done, (was going to post a specific project we worked on, but trying to squeeze it in before the vacation days, I wouldn't have done it justice), superintendent chapter volunteer obligations, watching the exciting PGA tournament finish, and just running around kept things busy.

                     


First some pictures from our trip to Indy.  First time at Lucas Oil, but we spent many of times driving by on our way to visit family in Indiana or when we would come back from World Percussion Championships in Dayton.  The dream of the boy and us was he would be marching with a Drum Corp in Lucas.  We had attended a couple of audition camps through the years, but not this past one.  He did do winter percussion this past winter, but didn't try out for DCI.  I think the trip was a little bittersweet as he saw people he had auditioned with in the past, and with his making a winter percussion group this past season, it was probably his best chance to march in the summer, alas this was his age out year, the last year he could have marched.  The second picture is him checking out the field for the first time, the third is a picture of my favorite corps, Casper Troopers, one of the ones he had auditioned for.  His favorite is Santa Clara Vanguard (mine too back in the days of the late 70's when we watched on PBS), this year's champion.  I think it's important to spend some family time together, especially before he headed back to school, I think getting away from the course for a few days refreshed me as well.    

 The view as we are crossing the river into St. Louis, I was following the PGA via Tiger Tracker and other superintendents who had spent the week volunteering at the tournament, this was right before play was called.  we turned Southwest on I-44 and avoided all the rain that was plaguing the tournament.

We did hit some rain before we arrived home, where it had really poured.  There was some wind as well, but we weren't sure of the extent, until later that evening.

After we had arrived home, I knew I had to go back to the course, because the forecast when we had left that previous Wednesday had not called for the rain we had received, and the irrigation computer was set to run.  Upon arriving at the course, I shut the computer off, and went out to turn off three controllers that are not communicating with the computer.  At that time I saw we had received 2.5" of rain, and did see some debris down, but it was dark by that time.


The next morning we were greeted with branches and debris everywhere.  With the greens full of leaves, we concentrated first on clearing them and tees with blowers and picking up the loose branches.  The rain had come down so fast the night before, and we had been so dry, it was possible to allow carts and golfers to play, and with the nice cooler weather they did.

                      

With greens cleared on day one, the next day we mowed greens and collars and approaches.  With just two of us in that day, we continued with picking up smaller branches and debris and blowing off fairways.  On Monday, which was another day we were short handed and had two of us in, we concentrated on mowing fairways and greens again, spraying greens, picking up branches and blowing debris further into the rough.

                     

Tuesday and Wednesday when we had the most staff members in, we were able to set the course up for play and the crew really attacked the larger items needing removed by chainsaws.  Above are some of the small trees and larger branches or tree leaders that had broke.  Below was our nicest Ginkgo tree where the top had blow out of it.  Of all of our Ginkgo's, Murphy's Law I guess dictated the nicest one to be damaged.  I didn't even realize it was a Ginkgo, it was such a big and nice tree.  Our park's tree crew did say that it will live for short time until it starts rotting out from the missing top.  It might give us some time to get a new tree in it's place before we have to remove it all together.

               

We were able to finally repair and rake our bunkers on Thursday, all in all the crew did a nice job, and our customers didn't have any complaints about course conditions during the clean-up.  I attribute that to the prioritizing of cleanup and regular maintenance returning to greens and tees first, then fairways. Also to the crew's constant work, the golfers seemed to appreciate their efforts.

The next step will be the tree crew coming and removing some of the hangers in the Sycamores up where we can't reach them, assessing the health of the trees remaining, and looking at getting replacement trees in place for trees we lost or will loose in the future.

As always,

Thanks for reading!

Mel


     

Tournament Experiences

I just finished my second opportunity this week to experience golf course maintenance being performed at some of the highest levels.  I completed 5 evenings of mowing fairways at the Price Cutter Charity Classic on the Web.com tour, held at Highland Springs Country Club.  I thank Derek Wilkerson, CGCS, the superintendent at Highland Springs for giving me the opportunity.  I was able to hear discussions on how they kept the moisture in the greens during tournament week, I got to see the detailed work that included, hand watering of greens, raking bunkers specially for tournament play, filling of divots, setting up the course, blowing of clippings, many things we do not do at our facility.  Of course some of it is resources and how we prioritize them, but I do think the work that we do regularly on our course could use a little detailed improvement.  Despite a poor weekend weather forecast that caused plans to be changed on the fly, (which poor weather never materialized, just some light rain for the middle of the final round), it was amazing to see how the standard of course setup was not compromised due to that forecast.  Contingency plans were made, so they were prepared for the worst, but thankfully those plans were not needed.

                  

On the left is one of the tour trucks down at the maintenance area. In the middle is the 10th tee as I headed out to start mowing back nine fairways during the Tuesday evening practice rounds.  On the right as I was mowing down 11 fairway.  I was pretty proud of that mow line, although not every stripe was as good as that.  We were not cutting much grass, (although I could see the clippings pretty well), I found the shadows from the trees and the angle of the setting sun made some passes more difficult.  

                  

As these pictures from Wednesday evening after the Pro-Am finished show, mowing later in the evening was a little tougher.  The picture on the right shows the lights on the cart that was blowing behind me a couple of hundred yards away.

                

 This was the set up for Thursday and Friday evenings, (and Saturday as well). Equipment was staged with the slowest pieces to head out first.  The maintenance building is down by the eighth hole, Derek would be up at 8 tee, and call for us to start engines, the group in the fairway would have played their second shots or third shots into this par 5 hole, and the group on the tee would have hit their drives, at that point we would all head up the maintenance road toward 8 tee and into the subdivision going toward the entry road.  Once there, we would hold until players on the par 3 4th hole had teed off and we then headed down the entry road, those going to # 1 would go down the outbound side, we going to # 10 would head down the inbound road.  Work could start on # 1, but they couldn't cross the road to # 2 until play had moved onto # 5.  They would have to keep that distance behind play, and we could start mowing on # 10 and then to # 11.  Since going to # 12 would take us behind # 9 and # 18 greens, we would drive out through a vacant lot to proceed down to 13/14, depending on the job we were doing, some could work their way back to # 12, they had me move onto 14.  13 was a par 3 so no fairway, # 12 was mowed after # 9.  On Saturday with the early finish, I did go to # 12 after # 11.  I was just amazed at the orchestration that occurred to move us into position to maintain the course while avoiding golfers.

I took the chance to ask a lot of questions, especially of their mechanic, he would meet me on the course once a day to check the reel to bedknife setup and since I had a demo machine, he would check on its operation.  I really liked this mower, and will definitely look to demo it at our course.  
 

                   

 Also It must be said, that many thanks are passed on to our distributers who provided food for the crew.  BWI, GreensPro, Turf Professional Products, and Van Wall Equipment all provided food.  All in all, it was a great experience and I look forward to doing this again.

               

As always, Thanks for reading!

Mel