Monday, November 2nd, 2009

I must start my report out commending Maggi for cutting costs to our budget by seeking alternative meat sources for our hamburgers. Most men will go a life time and will never have the success that she accomplished in one month. Way to go Maggi!

Looks like we will be in a frost pattern with this clear weather. Let's remember to maintain clear and concise communication throughout the delays.

Today Mike, Jason and I will be attending the OGCSA Environmental Meeting at Royal Oaks. Normally this is on a day when it is stormy and our time is well spent learning. Well, it looks like today is going to be one of those days which we wish we were here doing fair weather chores around the golf course. It looks like we are going to have a break in the weather this week and we have a few tasks that we will need to get done while the weather lasts.

Greens
We have a list of items that we need to get done this week on the greens starting with topdressing. We will do so probably on Tuesday. I will ask Rich to see if we have any groups going off first thing. We like to get a head start if we can. We are due for our plant protectant application this week as well as fertilizer. With good weather comes lots of golfers and we will do our best to get everything done with minimum impact.

Tees
Along with greens we will need to spray the tees as well. We are planning on spraying some elemental sulfur along with some nitrogen and some iron. The sulfur has plant protectant characteristics and will help them recover from the dollar spot and fusarium outbreak.

Fairways
Three more to go (three, four and five) and we will be done topdressing, excluding four, five, and seven. We will continue to topdress those this winter as weather and plant canopy allows. This will help alleviate some of the worm cast issues. 

Rough
We still have not fertilized but as the weather is warming this weekend I have noticed quite a bit of lush growth in the rough. We will still be fertilizing but on a as needed basis and as the weather allows.
We are starting to see a few soft spots showing up, mainly in the lows and along the cart path edges. These will make great projects as the mowing slows down. Some of the first areas I would like to see us focus on will be the lows behind the clubhouse along the cart path.

Projects

As stated above we will start repairing soft spots when the mowing slows down. This week Zef will finish the pipe repair on four which will allow us to fire up the pump station again. We had to turn everything off in order to get all of the water out of the pipe. Apparently we have a large gate valve that doesn't seal completely which keeps us from isolating that particular area.
The barley bails are out, it will be interesting to see how things look next spring. I mentioned in our manager meeting that we replaced one of the light fixtures in our equipment bay and it made a big difference. Jack is now working on getting us a rebate for replacing the remaining lamp fixtures in the shop as well as the ones in the cart barn. I believe we should be able to save quite a bit on power with the new lamps as well as possibly installing motion sensors. I need to contact Energy Trust and see if our new cart fleet would qualify for a rebate since the charging system is supposed to be more efficient.