I found some time this morning to finally update the blog for the first time in a few months. Without a doubt this year has been an interesting one, for starters I came out to the course in March to find 5 greens that were at least half dead which wasn't the start that I was looking for. My 6th day on the job we began trying to rid the greens of ice including manual removal as well as snow blowing the greens and applying gypsum to melt the ice down. Both worked but were too little too late, the damage had been done as seen below.
A wet June meant not much for root growth, ours currently are anywhere from 1/2" stretching all the way down to 2" which didn't help us much as July has been HOT! Oh and our assistant left us the first of the month.
Now we are closing in on surviving July and the central for the irrigation system is down and the local distributor doesn't have parts in stock to get us running but that doesn't matter because the electronic butterfly valve that regulates flow out of the pumphouse is stuck closed for some reason so even if the central was working we couldn't push water anyway.
How do we deal with it? Trash pump hooked up to the line we use to winterize the system in the fall. We are working on setting that up right now and in a short time we will be hand watering the greens with the pressure from the trash pump.
What doesn't kill me will only make me stronger, I really hope this makes me stronger!