Tough Week to Get Anything Accomplished

Soggy Week

Rain has definitely been in the golf headlines over the past few weeks.  The PGA Championship managed to get through to a very nice Sunday finish, but not without some controversy surrounding wet course conditions earlier in the week.  This week the Korn Ferry Tour is in Raleigh for the UNC Health Championship, and they are facing very similar conditions.  As for our little part of the world this week was scheduled to be one of our busiest of the year with the Irving Park course scheduled for aerification.  Over the last several days we have accumulated right around 4.5 inches of rain on a course everyone knows drains really poorly.  It's a tough week because we lose Monday to Memorial Day, but the Irving Park course is small enough that the task can easily done in 4 days, maybe 3.5 if something small occurs.  We then lost Tuesday to an all-day rain and Wednesday was only slightly better.  While Thursday was better the cloud cover and expected evening rains will do little to dry the course out.

Our normal process for this week is to aerify all the short grass on the course, which measures a little over forty acres.  With the conditions we experienced, we were forced to prioritize just the greens and a few select tees.  The golf calendar for both golfers and the course maintenance program is extremely busy, so there are no plans to reschedule this work going forward.  We have a strong annual cultural maintenance program in place, so if we occasionally miss an opportunity the repercussions will not be all that significant, especially on the Irving Park course.

Saturated Fairways

In addition to the rain affecting our aerification schedule it has created a lot of other problems for us as well.  The bunkers, which are always vulnerable to washouts, are all damaged from the week's rain creating a lot of work for the staff just to get them back in shape for the weekend.  We also have more than normal debris on the ground from all the wind and rain.  While we normally mow out the course three times a week, due to rain and all the other work simultaneously going on we have only been able to mow a few select areas of rough this week.  After last night's (Thursday 3/29) additional 1 inch of rain everything else will have to wait until next week to be mowed resulting in some 10 days of unfettered growth.

Washed Out Bunkers

With all that said, we will accomplish our biggest priority going into the summer by getting all the Bent greens aerified and back open by Saturday prior to the onset of the hotter weather right around the corner.  In this line of work, it still to this day, amazes me how much the weather affects the outcome of the final product we as Superintendents and Golf Course Maintenance staff work so hard on to try and deliver for our members and their guest. 

Farm Course

The Farm course has also been affected, but in a more subtle way.  The bunkers have less of a washing issue than at Irving Park, but they have been saturated and difficult to rake.  The course has a more modernized set of drainage infrastructure, but Zoysia is like a sponge and during weeks like this even the best drainage system is slow to make a difference.  The course has been mowed out once and will need to dry out over the weekend before it's next cut.  Once we do finally get out and cut everything again the quality of cut will suffer due to the excess growth between cutting cycles and the fibrous nature of Zoysia grass, which makes it difficult to cut even under ideal situations.  The biggest and most notable outcome will be softer and slower greens.  While the greens are still mowed daily during these types of weeks, they are not double cut and rolled every day, which is our normal procedure.  On top of that we were unable to verticut and sand the greens this week, which will have a noticeable effect on green speed and the smoothness of ball roll.