Wrapping Things Up

We have been busy finishing up our final preparations for the winter months. On October 21 we began our irrigation system blowout. In this process we hook a large sized air compressor (1600 cfm) into our irrigation system and blow compressed air through our irrigation system at around 90psi. This process removes all water from the pipe, swing-joints and sprinkler heads of this system. This is necessary to ensure that the system does not freeze and crack/break from the water expanding within. This process is quite possibly the most important thing that we do each year. The irrigation system is such an important part of our operation so ensuring that blowout is done properly will ensure a properly functioning system and a system that will not need to be repaired. The process took about a day and a half this year and was completed on the 22nd.

The air compressor hooked up at pumphouse

It snowed on the 21st making blowout a little more difficult

We finished our last bits of winter fungicide spraying on October 25. The last areas that we did were the tee boxes and fairways. This will help us protect against the development of winter disease and protect against the extreme temperatures and weather of winter.

14 fairway after fungicide application

On October 30 and 31st we put all the tarps out on all 22 of our greens. We tarp our greens to help protect and insulate the greens over the winter. Extreme colds and winter winds can freeze and dry out the greens to the point of plant death. This is known as desiccation. So the tarps help to keep the temperature between the plant and tarp warm enough that the plant can handle it and it protects the crown of the plant from drying out from being exposed to strong winds through the winter. We then follow up tarping with snowfence. We put snowfence around the greens and our tee boxes. The snowfence helps to trap snow and hold it on top of the greens and tee boxes. Snow is the best insulation out of anything for the golf course. A good layer of snow will keep the temperature at the turf level much warmer than the air temperature and keep things alive. We will also be putting some snowfence across the fairways on holes 5 and 7 where we completed grow-in this year. The newly established turf is not as strong as our well established turf yet so the snowfence will help to protect these fairways from the winter elements so they are happy and healthy come next spring.

14 green after the tarp was installed

Looking out to the tarped 12 green on a beautiful fall afternoon