This Masters week will feature no rain

 

There will be no talk of Subair at this years Masters as are spring drought continues. The last time there was a rain free Masters from Monday through Sunday was in 2011! Augusta looks amazingly pure right now and it will be interesting to see how far they let it dry out. Our bentgrass greens on the South are just about finished filling in from aeration and should be putting nicely for Masters weekend.

The dry weather is making it easy to see some immediate benefits to our new TurfRad soil moisture sensors. We have mounted these new sensors to one of our utility vehicles which then is driven up and down the fairways in 3-4 passes. The sensors use a microwave technology to give us the volumetric water content of a large area. In two hours or so we can have millions of data points detailing moisture levels across the property.


The sensors collect the data and when the cart comes back to the shop it is uploaded to the TurfRad cloud. Over the next week we will continue taking measurements and the end results will get more and more accurate. Immediately however, we can identify dry and wet areas and start adjusting irrigation run times with more precision. In the next two weeks we will have this data connected to our irrigation computer and the software will start adjusting all 2,000 or so heads on the fairways and tees automatically. Once that starts to happen all we have to do is check the adjustments and then observe how all of our surfaces become more and more consistent.

Ultimately the goal is more precise and overall less water usage. When you look at the data for 18 South fairway from Tuesday it was very dry. We increased the amount of water here slightly and the results have been excellent. Having reliable and available moisture readings for such a large area will help us stay much more consistent, with less dry to wet swings, as we get into summer time.

For most of the week we have been focused on more detail work with edging sprinkler heads and the cartpaths on the South. We are still waiting for our new native area mower to show up so we went ahead and chopped down the newly sodded area on 13 South by hand. One more pallet of fescue was laid here this week as well, finishing up this hill for the season.

We are excited this week to welcome Nick Graves to Carmel as the new North Course Superintendent. Nick has a very strong background with both cool and warm season turfgrass and is highly focused on staff efficiencies, detail work and of course maintaining high end turf. Nick comes to us from Luling Sport Club in San Antonio and has also spent time at Briggs Ranch and Bluejack National in Texas. Nick is excited to get back into the Country Club side of the industry and have his family settle here in Charlotte. Welcome Nick!

Enjoy the Masters this weekend and get ready for another taste of summer next week!

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