Project Wrap-Up

It looks like the great stretch of weather will come to a end this week with highs forecasted to be in the 30's. Saturday the 24th will be the last day for play and we hope to apply a heavy application of sand to the greens next week.

We are glad many of you were able to enjoy the nice days November offered and take advantage of our free round for Veterans. Looking back I think November was nicer than October when considering the number of warm days.

The weather also allowed us to work on a couple projects to give us a head start next spring. The newly designed tee complex was dormant seeded and covered with straw to keep the seed in place until spring. A dormant seeding is when the seed is applied but not expected to germinate until next year. The benefit is the seed is down and ready to emerge long before we could work on the the wet ground next spring.

As a reminder we changed this tee complex for two main reasons. First the tee was unlevel and as a huge "runway tee" would be difficult to strip and level to customer expectations. Secondly this tee was left over from the old course before expansion to 27 holes so the tee lined up with a fairway that no longer exists. The tee encouraged players to hit the ball onto the 9th fairway more than the 10th.

The new 10th tee complex shifted the tees right and lined them up with the fairway. The silver and white tees are a bit shorter while the blue and black are the same length.

The chipping green project is also moving along well with the weather and hard work by the staff. The new addition should open mid to late summer next year with a sand bunker and many areas to practice your short game from. The area had to be elevated due to construction debris being buried under the site and mounding was added for aesthetics and safety.

The dirt for the mounding came from the nearby 10th tee project along with thousands of yards donated by Baumhardt Sand and Gravel as they were working down the street and it saved them money to give us the material rather than haul it away.

Trenching drain lines in the chipping green. 1" of pea gravel goes in the bottom followed by the perforated tile and then the trench is filled with pea gravel. (sometimes pictures from my phone will not stay upright so you need to tilt your head.)

Carefully spreading a 3" layer of washed pea stone on the green base while not driving on or catching the soil below.

Building a green takes a lot of steps, first the base is graded to the specified slopes, leaving a 12" lip of soil around the green. At this point the green looks like a pond or swimming pool and really confused some of the customers. Irrigation is put in around the green and drainage tile is put at the bottom of the green.

The lip of the green disappears when 3" of pea stone is laid on the base followed by 9" of sand/peatmoss mix called greensmix. In our case the greensmix will be installed in winter to allow the surrounds to freeze to reduce damage from the trucks.

But the best part of the warm November days is we were able to grade and seed the mounding around the green and then covered it with straw blanket to prevent erosion. This site was just under a acre and the small staff earned it's wages working hard to get it all done in one day.

In spring the greensmix will be graded and seeded and the bunker will be finished and filled with sand.

The new chipping green site with the surrounds covered with seed and straw. The sand bunker is
barely visible on the bottom left.

The final project for this fall is a redo of the red and silver tee on hole 17. The old tee was small and unlevel but also had large tree roots from the nearby pines poking out causing a unsafe condition. The new tee has been shaped and topsoil added. We will allow it to settle over winter and seed it in the spring.

To all our customers thank you for your business and feedback and enjoy your winter.

Project Time

Each fall we try to finish one big project based on customer comments, feedback and what is good for the golf course. I can tell you now next year will be a redo of 27 green. We plan to strip the sod off the back half and lower the huge mound to create more cupping area and with luck and good weather put the sod back. We will also add some smaller mounds and new trees to separate the green from the clubhouse and driveway. The redo of 27 was not done this year because the WSGA (Wisconsin State Golf Association) asked us not to due to the State Best Ball being played at Rolling Meadows next spring.

But this year we started with a goal to build a chipping green near the putting green to give customers a great option for practicing their short game. The area needed to be raised and have some mounds around it so we secured a large amount of free fill for the project from a building addition down the road. Unfortunately the free clay fill turned out to be mainly concrete and blacktop so we had to turn it down.


The chipping green site right of the putting green.

Our second option for the needed material was to re-construct the nearby 10th tee as per the master plan drawn in 1993 but not done during the expansion to 27 holes. The project takes the old "runway" type tee and separates it into 4 tees while moving it right to line up with the fairway. The original tee was leftover from the old course and was set up to cause golfers to hit into the 9th fairway because the original first hole played up the current 9th hole and ended near the current 2nd fairway. We choose the 10th tee because it was close, had the extra material we needed, was un-level and one of four tees not redone during the expansion to 27 holes or since then. (5, 19, 24, 25 are the others)


The new tees line up with the hole the way it was designed.

 The 10th tee project will give us enough material to start the chipping green project but will probably not have enough for the mounding. We did hire a bulldozer to shape the tees and green but the rest of the work is done in house.


The staff removing excess soil from 10 tee to take to the chipping green.

The building of a quality chipping green will require a lot of in-house work. First the base of the green is built to match the final grade which in this case the green will have 2' of slope from back to front. Then a 7" lip of clay/soil mix will be built around the green followed by 3" of topsoil. The green will then look like a 10" pond. Drainage will be installed in the green and through the sand bunker. Then irrigation will be installed on the outside of the green. The 10" "pond" or green-site will be filled with a 2" layer of clear pea stone and a 8" layer sand/peatmoss mix.

It is our goal to get the tee and tee surrounds and green surrounds built and dormant-seeded this fall and covered with straw blanket and seed the green in the spring. All of this is weather dependent of course. Under normal conditions the areas should be open in mid summer.

We also hope to construct a new red/silver tee on hole 17 to replace the current tee that is too small and is having problems with root encroachment under the tee causing a dangerous situation if the tee markers are placed in the wrong place.

This weekends rain will slow the project down a couple days but was very needed to settle the tees and green-site along with filling the ponds and marshes. This was the first time in 16 years the marsh on holes 13/14 were empty so we could mow them.

Feel free to contact us with any suggestions you have for future projects we can consider. Items on our list of possible projects include.

• Drain hole 9 pond and bring the bank back to the original design.
• Level the back of 27 green. (Scheduled for 2013)
• Re-build 19 tee to master plan.
• Ease the approach to 25 green or enlarge 25 green.
• Re-build 7 fairway to allow for easier second shots over the marsh.

What happened to my lawn?

If you lawn is like mine it may be looking thin, weedy and full of crab and quack grass!  With a few steps you should be able to bring the turf around to have a healthy weedfree lawn for next summer.

Thin or bare areas - When the rain started after the drought most areas that are going to fill in with desirable grasses have by now or they are not going to. However depending on here you live and how much rain you had it is probable those areas died rather than just going dormant. Right now we are in a mini-drought with un-irrigated areas going dormant again but it looks as though rain is on the way.

The next couple weeks would be a great time to rake those areas with a steel rake and spread some seed. If possible lightly rake back and forth to work the seed into and past the dead material, pack down or cover with a light layer of soil as a topdressing and then pack. If it is only a couple patches covering with burlap or straw until the grass is up will help hold the moisture in to allow faster seed germination.

Even weedy areas can be seeded now and the weeds can be taken care of later in fall.

The best sunny lawn mix will have 80% kentucky bluegrass and 20% perennial ryegrass in it or up to 20% fine fescue. 100% kentucky bluegrass will work but it does take longer to germinate and emerge so the perenial rye is used as a nurse crop to help stabilize the soil and provide shade for the new bluegrass plants. For shady areas your mix should have more than 50% fine fescue in it with kentucky bluegrass and not more than 15% ryegrass. (Examples of fine fescue are creeping red, chewings and hard fescue.)

Beware of discount seed mixes that contain some or all annual ryegrass or rough bluegrass. Annual ryegrass will die over winter and rough bluegrass is not a desirable lawn mix. A perfect mix for the average lawn would be 60% kentucky blue, 30% fine fescue and 20% perennial ryegrass. This will allow the bluegrass to thrive in most of the lawn but the fescues to thrive in those few shady sites.

Weeds - During the drought weeds of all sorts took advantage of the dormant thin turf and are trying to take over. To control dandelion, clover, creeping charlie, creeping jenny, nut sedge and other perennial weeds wait until after a frost or two when the plants are weaker for better control. Even then creeping charlie may have to re-treated next spring when it starts growing again. A quality three way selective-herbicide from a reputable source will take care of the weeds. Spraying weeds is more effective than using a granular product but both should work when  used according to the label and directions.

Crabgrass usually comes up in late June and early July and looks light green in color and grows laterally or nearly flat on the ground. Right now it is seeding out with spiny looking stems and seed heads. Because it is a annual it will die during the first hard frost but the seeds it produces will be there next spring waiting to germinate. The best way to treat crabgrass at this point is to remember where it came up and treat those areas with a pre-emergent weed control next spring following the directions and rates on the label.

Quackgrass is a perennial and never goes away and can only be eliminated by using a non-selective-herbicide like roundup and killing everything and starting over. Quackgrass like many weeds is a plant of opportunity filling in thin areas of your lawn. The best treatment is to have a healthy bluegrass lawn to crowd out the quack. In years of normal rain it should be a minimal problem for quality lawns. The plants there today will live for years but a pre-emergent herbicide next spring should keep more plants from establishing from seed.

Fertilizer - September is a great time to fertilize your lawn while it is actively growing to prepare it for winter and next summer. Recent research has shown that a late fall fertilization is not as effective as once thought because it is not taken up by the plant. The amount and type of fertilizer needed really depends on your unique lawn so visit a vendor you trust and ask for a recommendation.

Fertilizer is sold as a 10-10-10 or 18-5-9 etc. The most important number is the first one or the amount of Nitrogen or "N". In a 18-5-9 fertilizer there would be 18lbs of nitrogen in 100lbs of product not the bag you purchase. Nitrogen comes in two forms: WIN or water insoluble nitrogen and WSN water soluble fertilizer. Water soluble fertilizer is normally considered quick release and will only last 3 to 4 weeks. WSN should make up 20 to 50% of the total nitrogen

The second number is for phosphorus or "P" and in most cases will be 0 due to state regulations and the fact most Wisconsin soils have enough phosphorus in them. For the golf course we take soil tests to check the amount of phosphorus and by law that is the only way we can apply it.

The third number is for potassium or "K" and is very important for plant health during stressfull times. In established lawns not much is needed but only a soil test can tell for sure.

Irrigation - Healthy lawns normally can thrive on just rain but in a year like this some supplemental irrigation may be needed for recovery or in future years to keep grass alive during long droughts. For established lawns and trees it is best to water heavy once a week to ten days rather than light every couple days. For this fall unless we get a above average amount of rain it would be a great time to water your established trees deeply. Let a slow running hose soak the area or use a soaker hose for a couple hours per tree to allow the water to penetrate deeply.

A healthy lawn brightens a homes landscape and increases home value. Yours may have taken a beating this summer but with a little time and work can be looking great by next spring.

Where are the divot boxes?

You may have noticed we picked up the Divot Boxes on the tees this week and yes it is a little earlier than normal. In past years we have waited until late September to do so with the hopes that customers would use them. Hopefully you noticed because you went to fill a divot and the box was not there but I fear it is because you went to sit on the box or throw your garbage in it!

Well the hope is over. I have watched the tees with divot boxes closely this year and it did not matter if we had daily play, juniors, seniors, member tournaments or even a WSGA Tournament less than 10% of the divots on a par 3 were filled. Often I would have 3 or 4 filled divots spaced between 40 to 50 empty holes. How can a member of the club take a gully like that and then not fill the divot when the box is right there?

After 7 years of investing in nice divot boxes and all the thanks in the world to the customers who use them religiously do we really need them out there? For now they are just gone for fall as our staff shrinks by over half this week and we do not need to invest important labor hours in moving the unused divot boxes ever time we move the markers. We are considering not even putting them out next year and just reinvesting the time we spend moving the boxes is more important jobs. I hate to let the golfers off the hook but right now we spend teams of divot fillers out every 10 days or so to fill all the par 3 and heavy use par 4 tee boxes anyway.

Again we appreciate all of you who do fill divots and the bottles will still be available on the carts so you can do so. I also appreciate all the people who fix their ball marks but if every person who told me they fix three or four per green actually did, we would not have any left. But that is a story for a different day .....

In this picture taken after a high profile event with local players

only 4 of more than 45 divots were filled. (I couldn't capture all 45 divots in the camera)

And it looks like one person filled the three because they are right next to each other.

Heat and Drought end with Wind and Rain

Wow, I has been over a month since I last posted but in reality not much had changed until now. Dry dry dry was the normal condition for the golf course. We went 41 days with only .4" of rain here on the south side of Fond du Lac with rain all around us. That ended early Thursday July 26th when we received 2.4" followed by .4" that afternoon and another shower Friday morning.
The rain was welcome as all of our ponds were down and the inefficiency of the irrigation system could really be seen with as many wet areas as dry areas. We had invested/wasted countless man hours in dragging hoses and hand watering over the past 2 months to keep key areas alive if not green.

Most un-irrigated places on the golf course are just dormant and will quickly green up although there are some areas that are dead and will need reseeding. We use a infrared thermometer to monitor surface temperatures of the turf to help gauge what time to syringe the turf with a mist of water to cool it down on hot days.

It is tough to grow grass when the surface temperature is 126!
This was taken in the rough on hole 12.

Cart traffic during the drought no doubt made things worse as what would normally be a slight wear areas became paths of dead turf. Also green turf that is under heat / moisture stress is susceptible to damage from cart traffic. The picture above shows a fairway that had traffic at just the wrong time and how the turf is damaged by the may wheels that go over it each day.



Cart traffic has a negative impact on turf under heat / moisture stress in the afternoon.

The negative of the rain is the fairways are a bit wet in places after weeks of watering tends to over-water some spots in a effort to get enough water to other places to keep them alive.  But the sunshine should bring things back to normal quickly this weekend. The real negative is the storm brought a lot of wind damage to the trees on the course. The airport recorded a 70 MPH gust early in the morning and I believe it given the damage we have seen.

In total we have 7 trees down completely and another 10 that are damaged to the point of being dangerous and they will need to come down. With the recent burn ban we have not been able to burn our burn pile so it is full from a summer of tree trimming. To accommodate the large number of downed limbs and trees we started a few temporary piles on the golf course to stockpile the wood until we can rent a chipper and mulch them up. This will be done quickly before the brush piles can kill the turf underneath.

Using multiple piles allowed us the opportunity to clean up more debris from the playing surface because it saved travel time to a single central location. We appreciate your patience during this time.


The Tent Was a Mess With Tables and Chairs Everywhere.

This damage near 23 tee was typical of what we saw throughout the course.

More of the same between hole 18 and 19



Many dangereous and hanging branches were removed.





Irrigation Time

With the dry weather the irrigation system has been getting a workout! It seems no matter how much we test the heads, controllers and pumpstation problems creep up through the season. The system waters about 60 acres of the 240 we have at Rolling Meadows with irrigation in greens, tees and fairways.  The pumpstation can pump over 1400 gallons a minute to feed the miles of pipe and over 500 irrigation heads.

The pumpstation pumps from the main irrigation pond that is fed by runoff from the upper half of the golf course in addition to a high capacity well. The pumpstation maintain a pressure of 90 pounds per square inch in the system. Green heads are spaced in a square pattern and put out 30 to 40 gallons per minute 55' to 85' feet. The big heads in the fairway throw 60 gallons per minute up to 98'.

This week we had a faulty sensor four feet under the water in the pumphouse that would tell the pumpstation it was out of water so the pumps would stop running. In the morning we would see the error and assume we ran out of water and the 2 foot inlet filter was clogged. However we could not recreate this problem during the day no matter how much water we pumped. After three nights of a total system failure and watering 10-15% of the course we figured out we did not have a water flow problem but a faulty sensor. It was a quick fix but something you do not expect.

Because of that you may of noticed the challenge we have greening the turf areas back up after they brown due to our heavy soils. They hold moisture well but when they get dry and turn brown or dormant they stay that way for days no matter how much water we apply. Although we have caught up on our application rates the areas still look off color and will for the next few days until they slowly come back. This is different than the courses I have worked at previously with normal or rocky soils. At those facilities areas would be wilted grey and brown in the afternoon and a little water would turn them emerald green the following morning.

With over 500 irrigation heads one or two of them break every time we water either through wear and age along with partially clogged nozzles that change distribution. We spend the first few hours each morning trying to find those broken heads and improving coverage.

Often golfers ask why if we have a automatic system we still have sprinklers on at 7 AM. Early morning is the best time to water for plant health and to reduce fungus and disease problems so we start the system as late as we can but we can only water so many heads at a time without pressure and performance loss. So we water the early holes (1-5, 10-14 and 19-22) early in the morning and the later or finishing holes around dawn.

The worst time for us or you to water is in the mid to late afternoon. The grass does not like to be wet during the heat of the day and a lot of the water evaporates before it hits the ground.

How do we decide when and how much to water? We use information from our weather station and a e-mail service from UW-Madison to determine our Evapotranspiration Rate (ET Rate). The ET is a combination of how much water a the grass plants would use in a day plus the amount of water evaporated into the atmosphere. The ET rate is calculated by temperature, sunshine, wind, humidity and dew point. Believe it or not the rate is usually higher in June than it is the hot dog days of August because the humidity is lower in June.

So far in the month of June our ET has averaged an amazing .23" or almost a quarter inch a day of water use or evaporation with peak days of .34". University research has shown that plants are healthiest if we replace 80% of the ET. .23' x 80% equals .18" of water a day we need to apply for healthy turf.  Under normal circumstances we try to water ever second or third day so we try to apply .36" or .54' of water per application.

No matter how new or technologically advanced a irrigation system is they do not replace rain and in Wisconsin they are designed only to supplement rain. Long term dry periods lead to wet spots from too much water and dry spots from too little water. We do our best to find these areas and increase or decrease coverage but our biggest problem is right around the heads or right in the center of the fairway where extra water is spilt when the heads turn on and off and with the single row spacing the area is hit by three heads.

Perfect green is not our goal with irrigation. Our goal is healthy but playable turf and dry and a little brown is better than wet and bright green.

Greens aerification

This weeks players may have noticed we poked pencil thin holes in the greens to allow air and water to penetrate the soil profile and loosen the soil underground. Although this process does lead to a couple days of less than perfect putting the holes are almost invisible 5 days later.

I realize the greens had been near perfect the past three weeks but with the long spring and upcoming hot humid weather it was a perfect time to give the greens a break. Also the greens are good for three weeks at a time because of the verticutting, aerification, spiking and topdressing we do to them every 3 to 4 weeks.

It would be great to have perfect conditions all the time but greens are a living thing and need to be fed, groomed and protected just like your body does. Fast and firm and tightly mowed is great for periods of time but maintenance has to be done also.

At the same time we applied a light layer of sand topdressing and a granular fertilizer because we knew we would not mow greens for a couple days after the sand was applied. The challenge for us is working the sand into the tight turf so we do not pick it up with our mowers reducing the effectiveness and damaging the mowers.

As I discussed last time the sand has many purposes.

1. It smooths the surface by filling in little holes and marks to allow for smoother puts.
2. It reduces the thatch layer that can make the greens soft and bumpy by diluting the dead roots and shoots and rhizomes the bentgrass greens produce.
3. Protects the crown or growing point of the bentgrass plant by slightly buring it.

The greens were mowed, aerified, mowed, rolled, mowed again, rolled again, topdressed, fertilized and watered. The next two days they were only rolled and on the fourth day they were mowed. That fourth day we get some sand but by the 5th day we only get a little sand and the greens are nearly back up to speed.

The challenge of the process is the wet sand and fertilizer sticks to the ball when players putt in the morning dew. Also the sand tracks on shoes and drops off in uneven piles to cause small bumps until we roll or mow again.

Believe me when I say we only do the maintenance that is for the best of the golf course and if we could skip the work we sure would. Thanks again for your patience as we maintain the playing surfaces you love and for the next three weeks, putting should be near perfect!