Drainage and Irrigation Work

We have been busy the last 3 weeks taking advantage of the nice weather and unfrozen soil to add drainage and irrigation to the golf course.

One challenge we face on the golf course, is back when they built the infrastructure and the course, they daylighted many of the storm water drains, the street drainage, onto the golf course. Whenever there is a rain event or runoff from homeowner irrigation on the street, it enters the drains on the road and empties out on the golf course in various locations.  This creates wet spots.  Between last winter and this winter we have went in and added drainage to these areas to collect the water where it empties onto the course and pipe across the course to a location where we can enter it back into the draiange system.

Currently we do have several trenches opened up as we are trying to do the projects the most econmic and efficient way as possible.  By prepping the locations with test holes and sod cutting, and then renting the equipment and trenching all the lines at one time, allows us to get the rental equipment in and out as fast possible.

This does lead to more of the golf course being torn up, but by the end of this week all the drainage and irrigation should be installed.

Annual Tree Maintenance Program in Progress

The golf course maintenance staff has been busy for the last 3 weeks removing and cleaning up a few trees.  They were removed because either they were dieing, unhealthy, in a poor location relating to irrigation or playability of the golf course, or a poor specie for the golf course.  A poor specie could be one of many things - excess dropping of debris, blocking sunlight and/or air movement, or a shallow rooting system that competes with the turf for water and nutrients.  If you look around the golf course where we have removed trees, most of them show an area of weak/thin/or bare ground that extends out to the branches of the tree.  This is called the drip line, and is the outer edge where the roots grow too.  That circle of weak turf shows that exact area where the tree roots are taking water and nutrients away from the grass.  By removing a few of these trees, we will improve our turf health and grass cover in these areas.
Our process has been, first felling and cutting up the trees.  The wood is located up near the sand bins along #9 if anybody would like free firewood, and staff has been hauling off all the branches to a designated location for future chipping.

    This is the hardest and most time consuming part of the project, as these trees do have a lot of wood and branches in them, and I commend the staff on their hard work.  




Thank you to Mike Welling for all of his help in the removal and cutting.

Then the tree stumps are ground up, creating a lot of debris for removal, and that area will be re-sodded in the next couple months.

 



 

Lastly, all the branches were chipped up and hauled off-site.  This step is done because we do not have a sufficient dump site to dispose of all the tree branches.

 

We also going around to all trees limbing up low hanging branches.  This is beneficial in many aspects as it allows a golf swing to be made under the tree, it allows better distribution of water, improved air movement, and allows us to get maintenance equipment around the trees.  

 

This work will all lead to healthy turf and better playability on your golf course.

 

Jason Habeck

LGCC Superintendent

 





Welcome to the LGCC Golf Maintenance Blog

Welcome to the Lewiston Golf and Country Club golf course maintenance blog.  I am Jason Habeck the golf course superintendent.

 
I have decided to start a blog with general education, updates, and information about what is going on out on the golf course.  The purpose of it is to be an informative blog for the membership and general public relating to course activity.  My goal is to post to it about twice a week, and the purpose of it is to not replace the golf shop with daily communication regarding frost delays and course openings or closures, but to use it as a communication tool with the membership and general public about course conditioning, what is all involved in golf course maintenance, and updates on what you will find while playing the golf course.

Please pass it along to your friends, and feel free to leave me feedback, comments, and questions.

 

Happy reading

Jason Habeck

LGCC Course Superintendent.