Winter Project: #10 Bridge

Though the initial intentions in building a stone walk bridge to the front of #10 green were good, the construction hasn't held up to the wrath of Mother Nature very well. Last winter, the bridge repeatedly got pounded by the rushing creek created by several rainstorms producing more than 1" of rain in less than 24 hours. As a result, our crew had to do our best to piece the stone bridge back together by hand on four different occasions. Being a safety concern as well, we knew we needed a better long term solution.

With input from the Greens & Grounds committee, we decided to build a wood bridge in similar fashion to the existing bridges on the hole. Built in-house, we believe this new bridge will be much safer and should provide ample room for the majority of rushing storm water to run underneath the bridge freely. A fairly simple project that will save us labor this winter, and improves the safety and aesthetics of this key hole here at Winchester.

Winter Project: Sprinkler Spacing - #17

As we all know by now, the biggest component of our success in having good summer playing conditions lies with the irrigation system. This property is challenging to start with: lots of elevation change, shade, rolls, hills, bumps, swales, clay soils, etc. And in the summer the number one thing grass needs to survive and be healthy is water. If our irrigation system doesn't put the water exactly where it's needed, in the most efficient manner possible, we have to make up for it by watering by hand. And let me tell you, 80 acres is alot of grass for two guys (our dedicated irrigators) to water by hand...daily. So we rely heavily on our irrigation system to do the bulk of the job for us during our nighttime irrigation cycles.

This past winter we focused on the functionality of the irrigation system: making sure it all works. We took inventory and fixed any leaks, or misadjustments in the arc of the sprinkler, a few nozzling and drive change outs, unburied sprinklers that were lost, raised and levelled many that had been knocked around. We made sure every sprinkler turned on, popped up, rotated properly, and turned off when we wanted it to. Everything now works and works properly.

While doing all this, we were also able to get the whole system GPS mapped, so we have an accurate record of where every component of the irrigation system is. The map also serves as a important tool in other ways: we can use a digital version of it to turn on sprinklers from a computer, iPhone or iPad and we use it during projects to make sure we don't trench through pipes or wires. Yet one critical example of the benefit of precise GPS mapping showed up right away: how poor our sprinkler spacing is in many areas.

Good sprinkler spacing should look like this:

This is triangular spacing (on another golf course) that is exactly like what is intended here at Winchester: every head makes a perfect equilateral triangle with 65 ft (plus or minus 2 ft) between each sprinkler. The sprinkler and nozzles are designed to irrigate best when installed in this fashion.

This is what just a small section of the spacing looks like here at Winchester (this is hole #14):

You can see triangles, but they are far more imperfect than those above. And the spacing between heads ranges from as low as 56 ft (ignore the edges...they're a different story) to 75 ft. It may not seem like much, but 10 ft in either direction means a 10 ft miss or a 10 ft overlap. So every triangle above that's not a perfect triangle helps explain summer wet and dry spots. Makes it a little easier to see why consistency in the fairways is difficult to achieve. And the longer we use sprinklers, instead of Mother Nature's perfectly uniform rain, to irrigate, the more pronounced the wet/dry spots become.

So one of our biggest focuses this winter is to try to correct the worst of the worst spots throughout the course. Correcting all the spacing would means hundreds of sprinklers: dig one up, remove it, patch the line, dig up it's proper location, cut the line, patch the sprinkler in, bury, and repeat. Very labor intensive and time consuming. But our focus is on the high playability areas and the areas we know we had a very difficult time keeping turf alive last summer.

 The picture above shows our crew moving a sprinkler near #17 approach. The dirt on the right is where the sprinkler was, the left is where it's being moved to. You can see how far off it was from it's properly spaced location. Making these spacing corrections in several areas throughout the rest of the course should make a significant impact on how well the irrigation system performs and improve turf health, playability and overall consistency this upcoming summer.



Winter Project: #3 Bunker

Wow....over 2 months since the last update. No excuse for that. I have plenty of catching up to do. Instead of asking for forgiveness, let me just get right into the good stuff:

Winter is definitely upon us. Twelve straight days of frost delays were broke today by the first rain we've seen in 3 weeks. But we'd love to see more (I know you golfers don't!). We're over 12" behind last year's rainfall, and while that is no real indicator of how the rest of the winter will be, a light rainy season most always means headaches for the following summer in terms of grass health, water availability, etc. So let's hope we see some more....soon. The good news is dry, cold weather has allowed us to step back from maintaining grass so aggressively and finally tackle some projects we've had on our to-do lists for quite some time. We've been so busy I have a half dozen projects to update you on, but we'll start one by one:

The lower greenside bunker on #3 was brought to my attention because it seemed to have little to no sand in the front right lobe and players would hit the soil with their clubs. We already know this bunker is a problem when it rains, or even when we irrigate heavily, as the sand constantly washes down off this flashed up face and ends up in the bottom of the bunker, often contaminated with silt and soil. So it's no surprising that not enough of it got put back up on the face of the bunker. But as we began moving sand around, we noticed that the subsoil in the bunker was soft and squishy. It appears some natural drainage is occurring in this bunker. So we resolved to address all of the issues with the bunker at once.

First came the removal of the contaminated sand that caused compaction and poor drainage in the bunker. You can see the subsoil drainage issue in the foreground of the picture:

After the removal of the sand (which we will recycle and use to lightly topdress the soggy left portion of hole #14), we added an "upside-down smiley" drain to catch the problem water:

Next, we chose to install a bunker liner fabric. Many other courses use a similar liner, and they've been known to work very well for two purposes: to prevent sand and soil contamination which keeps the sand clean and pure, and to help hold the sand on the flashed up faces of the bunker to prevent against major washouts during rainstorms:

With over 60" of rain last year, you can imagine how much time our crew spends rebuilding washed out bunkers after a big storm. So this bunker will be a test...if the liner works well, it would make great sense to use it in other problem bunkers moving forward to save labor by lessening the impact of washouts and keep the bunkers in a more pure and better performing state.