Drainage project

3 fairway has been our most challenging fairway since the golf course opened 13 years ago.  With very high sodium and bicarbonate levels, along with the heavy clay soils is has been very difficult to get a good stand of grass in some areas of the fairway.  While we have been able to make progress on these areas over the past few years, the thin turf in the fairway is still not up to our standards.  So the next step in trying to improve these areas is to add drainage.  This drainage is being installed to try and intercept ground water, allowing the surface to drain better, which will allow us to flush more sodium from the surface and giving us better growing conditions.

While adding drainage seems simple it is a very labor intensive job.  We first come in with a trencher and create a trench about 5" wide and 12" deep.  We then come back in and remove all the loose soil from inside the trench and on the surface.  The next step is to add 4" slotted drain pipe and fill the trench with pea gravel to add in collecting more water.  We will cap the drain lines with sand. 
There will be 800 feet of drainage installed on 3 fairway, 100 feet installed on 7 fairway, and another 150 feet installed on 15 fairway.

3 fairway

3 fairway in late April 2011

3 fairway in mid June

While 3 fairways turf conditions are not at an acceptable level we have seen improvement over the past 30 days.  Over the winter we experienced a large area of turf loss about 250 yards from the green due to a multitude of reasons, dry winter, extreme cold temperatures, hard clay soils, high salt levels, southern facing slope.  This areas was large enough that the only way we could get turf in this area again was to aggressively treat the soil with gypsum to help aid in the flushing of salts from the soil, overseed with ryegrass, fertilize, water, and play the waiting game.  We will continue to aggressively nurse this area back to health and we should see even more improvement over the next couple of weeks.