Good Morning!



12 Tee looking towards Stamford CT.  Beautiful view.

Things are progressing nicely at the course.  New greens are coming along and on schedule for the Memorial Day weekend projected opening.  All damage to the greens last year has healed and the greens are in fine condition.   Our fairways are dense, and the rough is actually very tough right now due to all of the spring rain.   We are mowing as much as possible to keep it under control while still getting our project work closer to completion.

During the early part of the spring we chose to mow the fairways in a half / half pattern.  The variation in color is provided by the direction the mower travels, as you see in the pictures above the darker color has the mowers coming towards you, and the lighter shows the mower going away from you.   The same occurs when the fairways are striped, the mowers just cut on an angle instead of going around the fairway. 

PLEASE DO NOT DRIVE GOLF CARTS OVER THE BLOCKS AT ANYTIME

We are getting a lot of damage to the blocks that edge the cart paths.  Our new carts have lower transmission casing than our older fleet and they do not clear the blocks.    

  Not only does it damage the block and make for costly repair, but it damages the carts as well.

We have scheduled a mason to repair all the blocks towards the end of May.
  



IHCC WILDLIFE gets a checkup.......

Dr. Goldberg and our very large snapping turtle get to know each other on #2.





New greens continue to improve, sod seems are almost gone.

We have aerated, overseeded and topdressed the new greens twice in the past 3 weeks in preparation for their opening.  They are now being mowed at .195" and we hope to have them at .165" when they open.  Our regular greens are currently mowed at .125" 




Heavy rains continue to make things interesting, we had this 3-3/4" storm wash sod down onto the cartpath on #8.  Thankfully this was a quick fix and the entire hill didn't come down.

We have begun our surrounds project as well, as per our Green Committee recommendation we will be stripping 9' of the mixed grasses in the existing surrounds and replacing it with bluegrass sod.   This will give the greens a very distinct appearance and provide a better and more consistent playing surface.

We are using the sod removed from the surrounds in wear areas near cartpaths.  Here we are repairing the areas near 9 tee with the old surrounds from 1 green.   






Our final bit of info for this update shows the excavator we had hired to replace the broken cesspool on the front lawn of the clubhouse.  The existing pool no longer functioned properly and continually sunk.  the old has been pumped out and filled, the new should provide many years of properly functioning service. 

Thanks for checking in on the blog.   Hope you are all enjoying the golf season so far, I'll see you out there.

 

-JohnnyP