Note from Fazio Superintendent regarding Wet Conditions

We have been facing several challenges over the past month when it comes to the irrigation system. We had to recently replace the central irrigation computer due to a lighting strike. We were able to extract some information from the hard drive, the one thing that we could not was the station run times. We set all run times at the default run time of 10 minutes then adjusted up and down accordingly.  Adjusting run times is something that we are constantly doing, it is an endless job. We are now adjusting from the summer watering schedule to the winter watering schedule in which the amount of water used is greatly reduced. However, with the above average temperatures that we have been having and the newly planted rye seed on the tees and fairways, we have had to run more water than we normally would during this time of year. The Rye grass is just getting established and does not have very long roots yet so extra water is needed. Along with the wet areas we also have areas that are not getting water and are turning brown, hole 15 is a good example of that. Our main focus the last two weeks has been these areas. We have been tracking and replacing melted wire and replacing different components in the irrigation controller boxes. While doing this we have also been monitoring the wet areas and have been reducing times. As for #4 fairway, we noticed that it was saturated and we started to turn the heads off in that area. It can take several days for some areas to dry out because of the soil type, in this area there is heavy soils with some clay. In watching this area we saw it was not drying out so we turned off the heads that surround the area and it looked like that helped some but the area was still staying wet. We went to the irrigation controller box to double check that the station numbers and amount of heads per station we the same as in the central computer when we found several big ants running around. Ants, other small insects, frogs and lizards can cause all kinds of irrigation problems from heads stuck on, heads not coming on and heads that randomly turning on and off. The last was the problem that we found here, there was an ant stuck on a computer board that was turning on several stations in the wet area. We do go around to all the controller boxes and put moth balls, ant powder and, as funny as it may sound, urinal cakes to help prevent creatures from coming into the box. These all do a good job but they are not 100 percent. There are also areas around the course that we have reduced run times to dry that area out and the surrounding area starts turning brown from not enough water. The fairway on #11 , about 125 yards from green, is a good example of this. We are still working on drying this area out without the rest of the surrounding area burning up. We found that there are five full circle heads that hit this area. We have taken two of those heads and changed them to part circle heads and have them adjusted to throw away from the wet area. This seems to be helping but is not the end solution. The end solution is probably going be one more part circle head and adding to the existing drainage. We are looking at areas like this course wide and coming up with solutions like I just mentioned. Our end goal is to have no wet or dry areas. This is a challenge when we have 90 acres of irrigated turf and approximately 975 irrigation heads on inconsistent soil types ranging from swamp muck and clay to pure sand and then factor in weather, insects and mechanical failure.  I feel that we have made substantial progress towards our goal in the time that I have been here.

 

Matthew Hausknecht
Golf Course Superintendent
Fazio Course