Just Add Water

Seems like a pretty simple concept right?  As a turfgrass manager, one of the most important parts of the turf health equation is balancing water:  don't want too much, and don't want too little.  During the spring months this year we struggled mightily to get as much water off the course as possible.  Two floods and numerous man hours pumping and squeegeeing fairways and bunkers seemed like a never ending battle.  And then, our good friend Murphy (if it can go wrong, it will go wrong) stepped in and shut the faucet off.

Since about June 20th the rains have stopped almost completely and we have been relying on our irrigation system almost every day since that point.  Fortunately this year, as opposed to last, we have enjoyed some temperatures much cooler than normal, which means that having to rely on our irrigation system really hasn't been too bad.  Everyone by now probably knows how much I gripe about our 25 year old piping and sprinkler network, but during a cool summer like this its shortcomings haven't quite shown as badly.

One of the major hurdles however continues to be keeping water in our irrigation pond.  The river pump was out for two weeks in late June and early July because of the summer flood, went back out in the river for 2 weeks, and then had to get pulled again for repairs.  With the river pump out, we have to rely on the gas pumps on 14 to keep our irrigation pond full, which is a very costly, noisy, and ugly compromise.  The river pump was repaired at Acme Electric, but then during reinstallation we discovered that there was an electrical issue with the 460V line that supplies it with power down at the river.

We rented a mini ex for a day to dig up the power wire for the river pump

The wire was buried surprisingly deep, close to 5'.  We discovered that the line
used to run down closer to the river, and at some point must have been
spliced and run to the new panel.

The river pump is up and working again, but even with it running 24/7 it will barely keep up with our irrigation demands.  The pump only provides about 150gpm, which equates to 216,000 gallons per day.  Without any supplemental rainfall, we go through anywhere from about 150,000 to 250,000 gallons per night irrigating the course, depending on the previous day's temperatures.

Furthermore, I discovered a few weeks ago that our irrigation pond is actually leaking quite badly also!  The 16" steel culvert overflow pipe must be rusted out somewhere underwater at the bottom of the pond, meaning we are continually losing about 50gpm out the overflow, or about 72,000 gallons per day.  Do the math on all of this and it means that our river pump cannot keep up with demand, so we will continue to have to run the gas pumps on 14 periodically to keep the pond full.

The pond overflow will leak out about 11,000,000 gallons
during our 150 day irrigation window from mid May
through Mid October.  Definitely a problem we
will be addressing late this fall.

What it really comes down to is that we need to come up with another way to supply water to our irrigation pond.  The river pump is very unreliable and doesn't even meet our water requirements anyway, and the pumps on 14 are an absolute embarrassment to even have out on the course running, not to mention expensive to keep putting gas in.  I will have to do some investigation into some other water supply options over the winter.

On a brighter note, we have taken the time in the last few weeks to add some irrigation heads in some rough areas that have turned toasty brown this summer.  Our irrigation system is laid out in what is called a "double row" grid.  Essentially there are two rows of sprinklers:  one that runs up each side of the fairway.  This does a good job of keeping our fairways irrigated, but a lot of the rough out past 15 feet of the fairway gets pretty torched once it quits raining.

With that, we have been pinpointing some areas in the rough where a lot of shots are played from, and thus it would be nice to have some more friendly turf to play from other than hardpacked dirt and crispy brown grass.  So far we have added heads in between the two fairway bunkers on the right of 6, in the right rough just short of 14 green, in the left rough along the cartpath up by 15 green, and in the left rough at the top of the hill on 18.  It was easy to add heads in these areas in particular due to existing irrigation lines that we simply tapped into.

The new head installed between the fairway bunkers on 6.  It is a Rainbird 1100
and puts out 61gpm in a 205' circle.  It is what we refer to as a "water cannon"

Adding a new head in the left rough of 15 to help water the dry turf
where the old bunker used to be.

Other areas we are targeting to add irrigation heads soon are in the left rough by the cartpath and bunker by 18 green, at the end of 17 fairway by the red tee box, across the bridge on the green side of 17 along the creek edge, and between 1, 6, and 10 green.