Winding Down

Russ, Steve, and Jamie our team members from the Penn

Looking at our blog it appears I let things slide in September. It is hard to believe another season has come and gone. The course opened for play on April 27th and closed for play yesterday October 20th. Taking into consideration rain events that closed the course during the season we were open for play a total of 177 days this year. This is only 5 days less than last season, when opening day was April 4th.

bringing our block valves up to the surface

The last six weeks have been busy for our turf care crew. All tee decks have been core aerated, double verticut and cleaned off. Greens and collars have all been aerated, topdressed, and dragged in. We continue to replace worn out irrigation heads and block valves. Many of the valves on the back nine are over 3 feet deep.So when we do decide to replace a valve we bring it up closer to the surface so that if the valve needs to be serviced we can have easy access at it.

Steve, Jamie, and Russ continue to work their way around the front nine pruning all of the low hanging limbs and deadwood from the aging poplars. They have amassed a large pile that will require us to perform a burn this fall. This practice has definitely reduced the amount of limbs that come down during a wind storm, thus saving us time on cleaning up after these events.   

Brad from Fusion Inc. fusing up the new tee

Installing the new tee in the muck

If you have driven out to the golf course in the past 3 weeks, you may have seen Andrew or myself working in the ditch along the highway by the 16th hole. The reason for this is we had an irrigation mainline tee that had failed and started to leak. Upon exposing the tee which took us many days and the aid of a hydro vac truck we could see that the tee had been leaking in 3 different spots. We removed the PVC tee and replaced it with HDPE. I am happy with the repair and do not think this area will ever been an issue again.

Sacha and Bella working on ball washers

With blowout complete and the course closed for play our staff is busy collecting course accessories, cleaning them, and making sure they are ready for next season. John is busy in the shop servicing our fleet of 72 Yamaha golf carts and getting all our mowing equipment ready for winter storage. By the end of the week we will have applied our final fungicide application on greens and select tees. Depending on the weather topdressing of the greens and tarping of the back nine greens will start late this week or early next week. Our goal is to have the course ready for winter by November 1st.

John working on the fleet of carts

I feel good about the progress we made on the course this season. I wish we could have done more, but with limited resources we did all we could do. A huge thanks goes out to our great Turf Care Team and the solid effort everyone put in on a daily basis. Our goal was simple, to leave the golf course better than it was the day before. Most of the changes may have been minor and cosmetic, but at the end of the day I feel like we accomplished our goal.