Who'll Stop the Rain?

This blog post reads better if you click on the following link:  CCR - Who'll Stop The Rain

We've certainly received our share of rain this spring.  The drainage we have installed in the last couple of years has had a dramatic positive impact on the course.  I have been particularly impressed with how much more often power carts have gone out.  In the past, I would have been forced to cancel them many times in a year like this.  With the new drainage, cart cancellations have been minimal even after heavy rain events.  The grass is also much healthier because there is no standing water in those perennial wet spots.  In short, the new drainage installed was a home run!

A couple of items to note:  the accumulation of water in the rough on the left side of #8 is by design.  All of the drainage installed on #4 is directed to a "dry well" in this location.  This gets the water out of the main playing area (the fourth fairway) and allows it to slowly drain into the area surrounding the dry well.  When there is minimal or even moderate rain, you won't see a puddle there.  When there is a lot of rain, there will be a puddle that slowly goes away.  The alternative is to pump this water up the hill and out to a storm drain on Lourdes St.  This would be expensive and require permits from the City of Waterloo.  It is far better to have this water in an out of play area than on the fourth fairway.

Water accumulating at dry well on #8

There is another dry well on the left side of #15 fairway.  This one is a slightly different story.  There is new drainage on the other side of the hill beyond the puddle in the picture below.  It's a little hard to tell but there is a big elevation change that we would have to cut through to move the water away from the puddle.  Before spending the money on this deep installation, we installed a dry well to see if the water would go away on it's own in an acceptable time period.  We are monitoring the situation and will connect to the exiting drainage if necessary.

Dry well on left side of #15

The wet, humid weather has also created some turf disease problems.  The picture below shows a disease called Dollar Spot on the 11th fairway.  We have sprayed very good fungicides twice in the last month to control this outbreak but the weather is trumping our treatments.  This particular disease is normally one that is very easily controlled but it seems that "all bets are off" this season.  Most of our fairways have a little of this disease but for some reason, #11 is by far the hardest hit.  We will continue to monitor the situation and spray as necessary.  It makes we wonder what our fairways would look like if pesticides were banned completely! 

Dollar Spot running wild on #11 fwy