Blame the Tree

 An August wind storm hit us on Saturday.

 Surprisingly no trees were blown over as one gust was recorded at 49 mph

 As you can see there is a tremendous amount of debris on the golf course.

 The difference between this storm and a winter storm is the grass is actively growing.  The playing field received over 1.5" of much needed rain during this storm so to be more acurate, the grass is VERY actively growing.

 The excessive amount of debris makes it impossible to stay on our standardized mowing schedule so the rough will be very long in places.

 In addition, it will require so much labor to clean this up that we will not be able to provide tournament conditions that you would normally enjoy this time of year.  We will not be mowing anything at standardized frequency.   The greens will be slower. The short grass will be shaggy.

It took half the staff all day on Monday to simply clean and rake the bunkers.  Do not expect regular bunker raking for the next couple of weeks as debris removal is now the priority.

 Given the circumstances, "winter rules" are in effect until further notice.

 There is too much large debris to mulch it with the rotary mowers.  All of it will need to be picked up.

 Tacoma is maintained virtually wall to wall.  There are no areas where we can just blow the debris and let it be.  All of it will need to be picked up and hauled away.

 This clean up will take time and a lot of labor.  This blog post is not to provide an exuse for the unseasonable golf conditions........This blog post is to provide a reason for them.  Please don't blame the Green Department for unsatisfactory golf conditions this week.  The blame should be placed on the tree.

Make note of the debris on #12 where there are virtually no Douglas fir trees.  This debris can simply be mulched by the rotary mowers in a few minutes.  All trees are expensive to maintain but very few are as expensive as Douglas fir.  We spend countless hours picking up after them, not to mention they shade your turf and they are choking out many of the endangered oak trees.  I'm sure everyone will clearly see the cost of trees this week although the real cost of trees is not always this visible.  If you want to know the hidden cost of trees, click HERE to read a very well written article from the USGA Green Section. 

Mowing the Cue

With the new Harbottle bunkers, there is a new term going around the Club, and that is "the Cue" as in fescue.  Many folks now have had the unfortunate buried lie in the Cue.  Today it is pretty benign since we just mowed it down, but a couple days ago I myself was helping someone find their ball in the Cue on 11 fairway and unfortunately we failed to locate it and the golfer suffered the penalty of stroke and distance.  I think the fescue eyebrows are growing a little too fast for cutting them at 2 week intervals.  I'm hoping that the growth slows down but since this is my first experience with the stuff, I really don't know what to expect. What I do know is we can't let them go to the extent of what you saw last week on TV at the Greenbiar PGA tour event.  Balls were getting lost in those bunker faces and even the commentators stated during the broadcast that they should cut those down a bit. Simply put golf should be fun.  It's not fun to miss a green by a foot or two and loose your ball.  So let me show you the process we are currently using to mow the Cue.  What we want to see is a ball coming into the Cue should bounce at least once.  After the bounce, your ball should be out of the Cue or into the bunker.  If by chance your ball comes to rest in the Cue, one should be able to find it and hack it out.  The following pictorial shows Miguel "the bunker doctor", giving the treatment to the Cue.

First step is to set the rotary mower at the highest setting and mow all the areas that we can.  This cuts it down to 4 inches.  As we do this, we try and move the mower in and out of the bullnoses with an action that is irregular since the end look is to be "rugged" and not manicured.

Then using this really cool weedeater attachment, we mow the vertical areas of the bullnose at about 4 to 6 inches and again doing this in an irregular fashion.  Since most of these areas are vertical, balls don't easily come to rest on them so its okay to have some it 6 inches and look really rugged.  Here is video of the "bunker doctor" clipping the Cue with this tool.

After that there is a lot of blowing.  The leaf blades of fescue are thin like wire and they don't blow easy.  It's almost faster to rake it out.  We are still experimenting with this whole process so it may be that we end up doing that way.

After blowing, of course the bunker is raked.  So following is a couple pics of the final product. 

The new Harbottle bunkers are simply gorgeous. 

Trees are Expensive

Driving in to work today, I decided to take the scenic route and check out what some other Golf Course Superintendents are up to.  Let's just say what I discovered was little discouraging.  I won't mention the name of the first golf course I looked at but I will say it is one of my personal favorites, and arguably one of the best golf courses anywhere.  Check out these pictures.

As you can see, it's a pretty nice morning here and the golf course looked firm so I guess the staff really could do whatever they wanted to do.  I didn't bother them since I know they are working on some very large projects as they prepare for an upcoming event.  I then drove into town a bit and stopped by another course where one of my good friends is in charge.  Again, I will not mention the name of this golf course but my friend said I could take some pictures and as you can see by this next set of shots, his course looks outstanding.

My friend was enjoying the morning because he was able to take advantage of the conditions and do some neat stuff.  He was deep tine aerating the fairways to improve drainage and playability.  Like all of us turf managers, we have limitations like staff number, equipment, etc.  But really my friend could have done a number of different things today to improve playing conditions because he wasn't limited by weather. I then figured I'd seen enough and decided to go to the Club knowing that what I was going to see was anything but uplifting.  Below are some scenes from the course at Tacoma C&GC this morning.

Yes, it's leaf season.  As you can see by these pictures, today we don't have the luxury to pick and choose what to do like the other guys in town.  We have every staff member today devoted to leaf removal.  In fact, there are so many leaves down that leaf removal is what most of the staff will do all week. Pick up of the huge piles involves the use of machinery and by the looks of the forecast, heavy rain will make that a challenge since it might be too wet for machines to be out on the course later this week.  So today and tomorrow we will scramble to pick up as much as we can with the machines.  Later this week if it gets wet, we will have to do it by hand and picking up huge piles of leaves by hand takes a long time.  If we don't pick up these piles soon, the turf under them will die back and that never looks good so we're crossing our fingers that all the machines stay running and the rain holds off.  All of the leaf removal around greens and tees is done by hand since obviously it's not good to drive big machines over these areas.  All of this hand work will take a little extra time this winter since our staff size is not what it used to be.  Please be patient with us as we try and get things picked up.  The scary thing is as you look at these pictures, notice that there is still a lot of leaves left in the trees.  Although we'd like to be doing other things to improve on the course, for now and the next several weeks, we will be focusing on leaves.  We do love our beautiful, priceless oak trees but loving them, and having them comes with a price.

Lake retaining wall

Here was the scene at the lake this past summer as unseasonably high water and wind last spring "washed out" our landscape between the pool facility and the dock.  Exposed irrigation pipe like this is not good.  PVC pipe of this type (all type that is white) degrades very quickly when exposed to direct sunlight.  Degraded plastic pipe is very brittle and should not be under pressure.   That is why all summer we had this area pressurized only briefly so as to irrigate the area, and then the valve was shut so that we didn't have to worry about this pipe breaking and causing a catastrophic "wash out".  Access to the lake with any type of machinery is difficult, and up until the last few months of the summer, this area was still under water.  That is why we are just now able to resolve the situation.  Soon, the rains will come and the lake level will rise making it very difficult to fix this problem.  So yesterday during the Police Fireman Tourney, most of the staff went into action on the shore of the lake.  This picture below shows them constructing a retaining wall of large crushed rock that wont be washed away by the inevitable high water we will see this upcoming winter.

Also, this picture shows that we sleeved the irrigation pipe with a large 6 inch pipe so that the rocks wont rub against the pressurized pipe.  So inside the sleeve is new irrigation pipe since the old stuff was ruined by exposure to sunlight.  You can see in this next picture that there really isn't that much dry land to work on and currently the lake is at it's lowest point of the year.

But lack of dry land is really not the most challenging aspect of this project.  The toughest part of the whole thing is navigating the steep access road from the back lawn to the lake shore.  This road is so steep that very few vehicles in our fleet have the traction ability to climb back up it.  In this case we needed to haul large heavy loads of rock down the hill and then climb back out.  The only vehicles that we could do this work with are the two all-wheel drive Toro Workmans.  Here you can see Kevin descending on the road with a heavy load.

Well it took most of the crew all day but they got'r done.  GREAT JOB GUYS!!  Below is a couple of pics of the finished wall.  Will it hold up against Mother Nature this winter?...............Confidence is high.

There is Strobili all over the greens!

As a turf manager on a golf course, it's hard to find a positive thing to say about trees.  I mean all they really do is fight against us on our quest for perfect turf.  They shade our turf.  They block wind flow around our turf.  Their roots take water from our turf.  On top of all that we spend countless hours picking up after them.  Lately I'm sure you've noticed an excessive amount of irritating little kernel things all over the greens. Below is a picture of what I'm talking about and these things are the male cones (strobili) of a Douglas fir.

The classic cone that we think of is actually the female cone which is larger and woody.  Those cones, which are also a nuisance, contain the seed.  The male cones which I'll refer to as irritating little things (ILT) produce pollen.  The pollen of the Douglas fir is why no one around here washes their car in May.  If you did wash your car this past May, I'm sure you remember the next day it was covered in yellow pollen. There are many different kinds of pollen.  For instance pollen on most flowers are sticky or maybe have little barbs so they can stick to insects and then get dispersed via the bug's journey.  The pollen of the Douglas fir is winged so it gets dispersed by riding the wind.  This is why no matter how far away from a Doug fir you park your car, it will still get painted yellow with pollen.  Anyway, back to the ILT. This spring we had some unusually breezy weather and therefore had several days where the ILT was really irritating.  Below you can see that some areas were literally covered in the ILT and looked orange in appearance. 

The good thing is that compared to the female cone, the male cones blow off easily and don't need to be picked up since they disappear in the rough.  Unfortunately, like the pollen they produce, they are easily wind blown so it only takes a slight breeze to make everything messy again.  Today, most of these ILT are out of the trees but we are still almost daily blowing out those bunkers which are directly under fir trees.  Please bare with us as we fight this battle.  It will soon be over.........that is until fall when the wind picks up again and we have all kinds of irritating things coming out of the trees.