Skokie Country Club Golf Course Management: Old Fashioned Style Watering

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Old Fashioned Style Watering

Round Three. Another powerful storm ripped through Chicagoland yesterday and left over 800,000 customers without power including Skokie Country Club and the Grounds Operation Center and (of potentially critical importance) our Pumping Station.

This storm actually was fairly mild in terms of tree debris left for clean-up but power supply was disrupted (and still is as of tonight) and with no power there is no ability to run irrigation pump motors, and therefore, no water available from the usual manner. During the last storm with extended power outage (4 days) soil was moist from plentiful rain, temperatures were cool, and skies were cloudy. Very low turf and personal stress.
Conditions during this outage are much different with no rain for three weeks (and very little rain from the storm), temperatures warm to very warm, and clear, sunny skies. Much greater turf and personal stress!
While I tossed and turned last night I had visions of my plan, for today's putting surface watering, dancing in my head. With a large component of our putting surfaces being poa annua there is little tolerance for weather stresses, whether from; high or low air temperatures, high or low soil moisture levels, and/or high or low humidity levels. As such we started early this morning using our jetter tank and our sprayer tank, along with small gasoline powered water pumps, and directly pumping from our ponds as well, to provide a modest amount of water to sustain the greens for the day.

It was slow going, as it took three of us (plus extra help during filling procedures) nearly six hours each to irrigate all the greens, a task which usually can be performed automatically with our 1800 gallon per minute pumping station, a mere 15-20 minutes total! What can I say...sometimes you have to do things the old fashioned way. Hopefully not very long though!