TwitPic Updates

Yesterday I added a new feature to the blog, TwitPic updates. One of the great features of Twitter is the ability to take a photo with my phone and immediately post it to Twitter. These photos are posted and managed through TwitPic. In the right-hand margin of this page, below the Twitter updates are thumbnails of the last five photos I have posted using TwitPic.

Enjoy!

Video: Update of Drainage Work on #11

This video is an update of the drainage work on the 11th hole.

Video: Nursery Construction Update

As promised an update on the construction of the new green nursery along the 9th hole.

Organizational (Turfgrass) Review

As a sports fan one of my favorite times of the season is the beginning of the off-season. Its a time when fans can look back on the previous season and look forward with excitement to the upcoming season. Often during this early off-season period, pundits go position by position, both looking back and gazing forward. During the next couple of months I plan to do something similar on this blog. Going through the golf course looking back at previous seasons and looking forward to next season. It should be fun and informative for myself and those who read the blog. It will hopefully give us some perspective on how far we have come over the past three seasons and in some cases how far we may still have to go.

Look forward to these posts in the near future.

Video: Covering the greens

On Monday and Tuesday of this week we started and completed the process of covering the greens for winter. The covers we use at Northland are called Excelsior covers. They are manufactured by American Excelsior Company of Rice Lake, Wisconsin. The covers are made up of wood shavings, which are sandwiched between two pieces of plastic netting to form a mat. The covers are three feet wide and 100 feet long and last between 3 and 5 seasons depending on a number of factors. The biggest downfall of the Excelsior covers is the labor intensive nature of their use and the need to have a large area for summer storage. On the plus side the Excelsior covers provide protection over a wide variety of possible winter conditions. There might be better covers out there for specific conditions but in my opinion the Excelsior provide the best coverage for the wide ranging winter conditions we experience in Minnesota.

During the covering process this week I shot the video featured below. Enjoy.

Video: Drainage work on #11

As you played golf this fall you probably noticed the area dug up near the cart path between the 11th green and the 12th tee. Late last summer we begin to notice this area being extremely wet. The problem seemed to appear out of no where with water bubbling up from the ground whenever we received significant rainfall. During last winter a significant amount of ice formed in this area. Water ran across the 11th fairway and the ice build up caused some pretty significant turf loss.
Late this summer Assistant Superintendent, Jake Ryan did some exploratory work and found the problem to be an old clay drain tile, which had been disrupted and blocked by the growth of tree roots. An attempt was made to solve the problem without major work but when that didn't work our only solution was to create new drainage that would take the water to an existing catch basin. The video below details the work.

An Interesting Trend

If you view my blogger profile there is a place where it lists occupation. My obviously says Golf Course Superintendent. If you click on my occupation it takes you to a list of all the Golf Course Superintendents using blogger. In the early days of this blog I can remember clicking on this link and seeing only a handful of fellow GCS's. Today I clicked on this link and found there to be 180 Golf Course Superintendents on blogger. Pretty cool!