The Hole Story

We always have our fingers crossed, hoping for good weather for fairway aerification.  The "Goldilocks" zone for us is good soil moisture, but not saturated conditions. If too dry, the turf will be stressed and quickly wilt; and if too wet, the plugs can't be proceesed, and cleanup is a mess.

For some reason, it just didn't come as a great shock that the weather was not amenable to our wishes, and the golf course became the bulls-eye for pop-up storm activity throughout the week, with several days of rain.

Sunday afternoon we had two localized storms hit us, putting down an inch of rain.  Due to how wet many of the holes would be, this limited the fairways we could aerify on Monday.  As the day progressed, we actually found ourselves making good progress by Monday afternoon, but in the midst of aerifying #1 we had another blast of rain, with a tsunami-like storm.  This was the first time we had a fairway completely open with plugs covering it when rain hit--what a mess!

Tuesday came and we aerified  a handful of small fairways, but due to the excessive moisture from the prior two days' rain, we could not grind the aerification plugs, instead having to remove them whole.  This is not ideal for several reasons.

Wednesday was finally a good weather day, and we took advantage of that.  However, we had to once again stop earlier than we'd like in the afternoon, as another round of rain was on the way--and we didn't want to risk a repeat of #1 fairway.  1.20" of rain came down Wednesday evening, and we were forced to raise the white flag for the week.

To summarize, we had precipitation on Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.  The rainfall totaled 3.20" for the week.When you take a step back and look at things from this perspective, we accomplished quite a bit.  We have four holes yet to be aerified, and they will be tackled as time (and weather) permits.