Grounds Update and Irrigation System Upgrade

The nice weather has finally arrived and the grounds crew has been busy out on the golf course. I have had about half of my staff working the past few weeks and we are getting into the swing of things. With school wrapping up at UND, most of the grounds staff will be started within the week. We have a long list of tasks to complete to get the golf course in tip top shape, but we will get there very soon!

A few weeks ago we had 47 stumps ground on the course and they have been leveled and seeded. Some of the larger ones may be sodded as we have more staff on hand. The greens have been consistently mowed at least every other day, and rolled on the other days. We have been able to mow tees, collars, and approaches. The fairways have gotten a few haircuts and with the moisture and heat that we've received, you can watch the rough grow. As more staff starts filling in this week, we will be on a more routine mowing, rolling, and bunker raking schedule. We will also begin the long process of pushing sand around in all of the bunkers and edging every single one of them.

As most of you noticed, we had some action going on at the irrigation pump station last week. We had VFDs installed on our pump motors. A variable frequency drive regulates the speed of the pump motor. The VFDs start our pump motors up slower and only runs the motor at the speed that it needs to supply 100 psi to our irrigation lines underground. These VFDs will save our irrigation lines from water hammering and will lengthen the life of our pumps and motors. It is also an energy saving device as we are only using the amount of power that we need vs. wasting energy when our pumps used to start up at full speed all of the time.

These are the VFDs that now run our pump motors

We removed the old butterfly valves that controlled the flow of our water and now will be able to allow more flow through our pipes. I should be able to water one or two more zones at a time during a water cycle.

We may still have some irrigation breaks this summer as our lines underground are 30+ years old and overtime, PVC becomes brittle. Although, installing these VFDs will reduce that number of breaks that we have been seeing the last few years and save us some money.

We verticut and slit seeded number 1 and 2 greens last week. We will be lightly topdressing them once a week as we go forward. I have already seen progress in both greens, and I believe we will continue to see these greens improve. We are busy working with Todd Daniels of ProTurf Systems on a plan for our greens and other various areas of the golf course this season. We plan on core aerating the greens on May 24th.

We've got an exciting and busy summer ahead of us!