Making the Turn

The month of May has been an interesting one for the Dinosaur Trail Turf Care Team. In the last 20 days we have received less than 10 mm of rain, so that has put a lot of stress on our outdated and damaged irrigation system. The Programmable Logical Controller or PLC for short that controls the variable speed motors on our turbine pumps, no longer operates, so all watering must be done with the pumps running in the manual setting. This overrides any high pressure and low pressure shutdown safeties and means that someone must be always keeping an eye on the pressure while watering. This has lead to some long nights on the golf course and a lot of coffee consumed. There is a light at the end of the tunnel as our PLC will be updated within the next few weeks, and I look forward to sleeping in my bed and not at my desk. To date we have replaced upwards of 25 damaged sprinkler heads, and have at least another 30 to go, not to mention the leveling of another 40 heads.

 I have inherited greens with some pretty severe hydrophobic conditions, so we have been applying wetting agent and doing a lot of hand watering, which in the last few days have started to show some improvement, but I am still not happy with where they are at. The growing conditions as of late have been great, but we really have not been able to take advantage of them, as we are just trying to keep our heads above water and not let the course regress.

This past week started off on a positive note as we installed new irrigation for our range tee and practice green. This area has been without water since the start of the year due to major spiral fractures caused by improper blowout. We abandoned the current piping and now have a solid system in place that can be expanded if we decide to improve our range fairway.

On Tuesday we attempted to repair a small leak in our sewer line down to our septic field which is located on the left hand side of the 1^st hole. One thing lead to another and we found the field had a major blockage in it and that many of the lateral lines were at least 50% contaminated with solids. I do not consider myself very knowledgeable on septic fields but I quickly had to learn. With the help of Dan Funk we repaired the blockage and replaced 10 of the lateral lines in the septic field, now the system is operating as it was intended to.

Old lateral that is contaminated 50% and has no drainage rock

 

 

New laterals being installed properly

septic field area ready for topsoil and seed

This week we start in on drainage and cart path repair work. Dan will be installing catch basins to deal with water that erodes our cart paths by the tunnel to the back nine and the 14^th hole. The cart path on the 14^th hole is as sketchy as they come. It is a huge safety issue that has needed attention and we have chosen to try recycled tire crumb over a product called ecogrid. It will be an interesting trial to see how well this product holds up on a severely sloped cart path. We were successful in securing a grant from Alberta Recycling to cover most of the cost of the project, so if this product works well we will continue to replaces the back nine cart paths with it.

Looking up 14th cart path

I am hoping in my next blog post I will be able to discuss how we have started to improve playing conditions, but until we get our infrastructure operating efficiently, we will continue to put out fires and tread water.

If it wasn’t for our great turf care crew at Dino Trail, we would have not progressed as much as we have. I am fortunate to have people on the crew that genuinely want to make the course better and take pride in their tasks. I feel things are only going to get easier from this point on, coupled with a great team, I think we are going to make some great strides in the next few months.