8-11-19

Good Morning,

Another week has passed us by rather quickly.  The golf course was busy with our normal weeknight golf leagues, 72 golfers in the Veteran’s tournament on Saturday, and 31 athletes this morning for the Special Olympics.  Yesterday was a great day to help raise money for our veterans and the weather was perfect.  Today is a special day to be able to participate in the Unified Golf event.  We are scheduled to host the Lakes Area Seniors in the morning, but it looks like strong thunderstorms.

The warm and dry weather has really started to turn the golf course a brownish hue in the non irrigated areas.  There are also some annual dry spots in fairways, greens, and tees that are always an issue.  The main reason for a lot of these areas is poor sprinkler head coverage.  The other reason would be issues with the valve on that particular station.

I have been working on the irrigation system all week.  There are several stations that have electrical issues from a lightning strike during a past storm.  One of the valve boxes looked like it simply exploded from the lightning.  This fries the solenoid and the decoder which are both necessary to run each irrigation station.

There are also valves that get a small rock or other debris caught in the diaphragm which allows the water to continuously pass through the valve and into the irrigation head.  This is particularly obvious in #14 fairway where the first sand trap is completely full of water from a leaking head.

Also, there was a section of pipe on #16 tee that broke.  When the station was programmed to run the broken pipe would not allow the water to get to the sprinkler head but it did allow the water pressure to fill the pipe with mud which has now made it impossible to run this station.  We are going to use a trencher from SMU on Monday to cut in a new line for these tees.

I started the irrigation system last night around 5:30 PM.  This was done in order to apply more irrigation time to the fairway stations.  It takes over 12 hours to irrigate the golf course at 100%.  Since there was minimal golf traffic and the temperature was much warmer than predicted I decided to start the system early.  I did receive a couple of phone calls inquiring why I was watering and how were people supposed to play golf?  It was one irrigation station at a time, per hole, and with a run time of 15 minutes.

The street division was on site to work on our parking lot this past week.  They hauled some 2″ rock to the north entrance of the clubhouse parking lot.  This material was packed into place and should eliminate the very soupy entrance to the golf course.  I guess we will see what will happen after all the rain tomorrow.

I treated the west end of the irrigation pond for algae on Wednesday.  This is a copper sulfate crystal application.  It kills algae by binding to it, which damages the algae cells, causing them to leak and die. Copper sulfate is highly soluble in water, and copper is a natural, essential mineral. Too much copper is toxic to plants because it prevents photosynthesis.  I will continue to work on the algae control of this pond in the coming week.