Saskatchewan & Manitoba Turfgrass: October 2015

With the golf course closing for the season this week; it is the perfect time to look back at how our season went and what we have accomplished.

I'll start off with a quick update of what has recently been done and what the month of October has in store. We have applied our first two applications of fungicide in our winter preventative and fall take-all applications. Our final winter application will take place in the middle of October. We have completed our annual tee box aeration again for another year.

4 green after a fungicide application

October will be a busy month as we will be preparing for winter. We will be removing and cleaning all course accessories, blowing out the irrigation system, continuing with fairway spot seeding, snowfencing the tee boxes and greens and tarping the greens at the end of the month. As usual we will be leaving the pins in for most of the month and allowing people to come and golf even though the proshop is closed.

The 2015 season was a very successful season and it was finally the season where I really think we saw all of our hard work pay off. Rounds and revenue are well up compared to previous years and the course has finally become something to be proud of. Mother Nature was also pretty good to us this season which really does help everything.

All areas of the course saw a great improvement this year. More bunker repairs were completed and sand was added to many bunkers. The bunkers are still one of our biggest problems and we will continue our work on them in the future. Drainage was improved this season with the highlight being the addition of the creekbed and pond between 18 green and 9. It is amazing how well this has worked and improved course playability.

Our tee boxes really did not need any improvement going into this year as they were already great but we kept up this trend and they are still always in excellent condition and without a doubt among the best in this province. The fairways were by far our biggest problem going into this season and they do still have a long way to go, but we did make a lot of progress with them this year. We were able to fill in and shrink a lot of the dead spots and we will continue to work at them next season until they are at a point that they need to be. The irrigation system is continuing to get better and better all the time and is becoming much more reliable which really takes a lot of stress away from us.

The tee boxes on par 3 hole #4

A look down 13 fairway

The most important area on the golf course, the greens, had an excellent season also. The condition they have been in all season has been quite impressive. Our club is very proud of our greens and we know that our greens will not disappoint anyone that comes out for a round of golf.

Hole #15 green

All of this amazing progress that we are seeing though could not be possible without the great efforts of all my staff within our turf care department. They have given everything they can to the golf course and you can see the amount of pride that everyone has in what we are doing. None of this would also have been able to happen without the support of our board of directors for giving us the tools and trust that we needed to accomplish everything. A big thank you goes to all of our members as well since they have stuck with the club through everything that they have seen and a few pretty hard years. You all deserve a great golf course and I am very happy that we are making the progress and beginning to give everyone the quality golf course that you all deserve!