16 Consecutive Days of Rain

The past 38 days have been difficult due to the consistent rains but the last sixteen days have been extremely difficult.  Our last completely dry day fell of June 22.  Since then we have had rain every day for the past 16 days and have recorded over 6 inches during this time period.

The effect of all this rain and cloud cover has been a course that has stayed saturated and has been nearly impossible to mow.  The Farm course with an extensive storm drainage system has fared much better than the Irving Park course but it too has been pushed to the limit.  The Zoysia at the Farm has shown a low tolerance for poorly drained areas.  Symptoms of decline have become noticeable over the past few weeks in low lying swales that are without any type of sub-surface drainage.  The good news is additional funding to drain the worst of these areas was approved and we have begun some of that work.  The bad news is we haven't made much progress on installing the new drain lines due to saturated soils that make it impossible to do this type of work.

Saturated soils on the Irving Park course seem to be the norm versus some type of unusual extreme.  In a year where we have seen well above rainfall totals nearly every month of the year and on a course that has little to no significant drainage infrastructure the days of mentioning course conditions and firmness in the same sentence have been few and far between.

#13 Flooding

While flooding has occurred in recent weeks and is a major nuisance due to all the cleanup and repair work to the streams and bunkers, the flooding in itself is not the biggest part of the problem we currently face. What is causing us the greatest problem is the extremely long periods of rain without any type of drying cycle in between.  Today is July 8 and we have not been able to mow any significant portions of the course, outside of the greens, since Monday July 1.  Both the fairways and the rough at each of the two courses are extremely long and getting longer every day.  These areas of the course are so wet the heavy mowers would do way more damage than good if they are used.  Our primary strategy is to wait as long as it takes before sending the mowers out and if need be raise the heights so we don't scalp the turf more than it can handle. We received nearly an inch of rain last night and the forecast this week is really no different from the past two weeks, so we are not overly optimistic about our chances of getting caught up this week. But if the opportunity presents itself we will take every advantage of it.  Looking at it more from a long term perspective the course will eventually dry up and we will get everything back into condition but until then the golfers will need to be a little more patient than normal with some of the wet and long turf playing conditions created by this sustained period of wetter than normal weather.