The long awaited re-opening on the Farm course is just a few days away and it can't come soon enough for all parties involved. The Irving Park course and its staff have done their best to handle the additional play this summer with more than its share of repairs going on throughout a lot of very busy play days. The practice putting green with its small amount of cup-able surface has suffered the most with all the play and teaching clinics, which has simply worn the surface down to the dirt in a few areas. Mid-June through Mid-July was very hot this year with 22 days out of 30 in the nineties and 10 days near or above 95. Water management and more specifically hand watering greens has been especially difficult this year with the temperatures, the high volume of play and all the extra repair work going on outside of the greens. So while the Irving Park staff loves seeing golfers, the expected normalization of rounds on the course will prove helpful to conditions of the course moving forward.
The Farm staff has been busier than almost any of the members could even begin to comprehend. Since the course has closed much has taken place. The greens were re-planted and the grow-in has gone well. The same hot weather that has worked against the Bentgrass greens at Irving Park has resulted in a very good grow-in on the new Ultradwarf Bermuda. Over three acres of sod has been installed on various areas throughout the course with a lot of the areas now having grown in enough that they will be somewhat hard to see. Three new forward tees have been constructed and several small but much needed drainage projects have been completed. Nearly 20 very large trees have been removed and with the exception of the last few trees that were removed just last week, all these areas have been repaired as well.
The opening week has not gotten off to a great start with nearly five inches of rain coming over the past 5 days. Sunday night's storm brought a lot of high winds with it creating a lot of cleanup work for the staff but it's nothing they can't overcome by the weekend.
In the end, the Farm course staff is excited to see golfers once again and the Irving Park staff is excited to see play slow down just a little bit. I'm sure all the golfers are eager to once again get to play the Farm course after 10 long weeks of it being closed. With that said, everyone has worked really hard up to this point and while I know everyone will be happy to see this day come and go, no one on our staff expects the workload to let up anytime soon. We still have nearly two months of summer ahead of us and all our extra seasonal labor will be heading back to school over the next few weeks leaving us with just our core group of fulltime guys who will working hard to keep pace during a time when everything is still very much actively growing.
We hope everyone can get out to the Farm course very soon, if not this weekend, and we hope everyone is pleased with all our efforts.
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| Hole #12 |
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| New Flowers |
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| Hole #3 |
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| Hole #11 |
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| Hole #4 |
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| #3 Green |
