Update and Tee up New England

This was a bit of a projects week. Most of our time was spent repairing some irrigation wiring issues and changing some of the sprinkler wiring. We had several wires break last year. Some of you may remember us tracking out wires on the fourth hole last summer. We do not have the right equipment to trace a break and so had no luck. We also lost the wire to one of the green heads on three and a tee head on one. Sometime over the winter we also lost another wire on three green so we were down to two out of five heads working. We brought in a professional and were not only able to find the breaks and repair them but the ones on three green were the result of a pipe repair under the collar where they cut three wires. So we would have lost a third wire soon enough on that green. This find also allowed us to re-wire the heads so the part circle is alone and the full circle it was twinned to will come on with another full circle. We did the same to the two part circles on two green. This will allow us to water only the rough and manage the water on the greens more precisely, IE drier and firmer. We also applied our lime/gypsum app. If you look on the main page of this  blog you will see a section of popular posts and last years post on this topic holds true here as well. Frank did continue seeding divots this week and we did get our first sprays out for seed head suppression. We also prepped the right side of one for hydro seeding. The woods there was always a bit beat up but we used it as a staging area for the material storage project so this will button up that project and also improve this area.

right side on one in the woods being prepped for seed.

beach at Mink Meadows as i check on the cuts progress

Tee Up New England is the fund raising initiative I briefly mentioned a few weeks ago. This is a new way to raise money for turf research in New England. The New England Regional Turfgrass Foundation celebrated it's 15th anniversary this Spring. It puts on a trade show and educational conference every year in Providence, RI to raise money for the New England universities doing research on turf related issues. This is sports turf, lawn as well as golf course turf. They annually fund at least $100,000 and have funded over a million dollars in studies to date. The new initiative finally gets the end user, the golfer, to help fund the research that helps improve the turf they play on every season. The idea is simple: clubs throughout NE donate rounds and then we auction them off. Click here to check out the Tee Up NE site. It is very simple to register and start bidding. This is the first year of this and our results may not be great but I personally think this is a really neat idea There are 500 or so courses in NE so think of the possibilities if we can grow this to that level of support. You can research each course on the list just simply click on the link to the auction site from here or the Tee Up New England site and scroll down the list. They give a brief description of the restrictions on each round and then a link to each host website. There are clubs from all over New England so you should be able to find some place to bid on either as a fun getaway or a gift for that tough to buy for son-in law etc. So check it out, register and bid often the auction lasts all week.