Bunker work continues through the wet but it's warm

 

Monday was the Hermitage department wide holiday party at Hardywood Brewery. Attendance was excellent and it was great for our staff to be together outside of work and win a few prizes for Christmas.

Monday we also let the deep tine aerator loose on all 30 in play greens. 

The half inch solid tines were going down about 9 inches through the profile. These deep holes will continue help us get water through our sand based system and also create a nice column of air for roots to fill into all winter.

The greens were rolled behind and while the holes are visible there is really no impact on putting. 

The main line on Sabot has made its way up 14 and it getting close to 15. The rain early in the week certainly slowed down progress here. Another small storm is on the way this afternoon and then we'll try to dry out some until the end of next week.

On Tuesday we ran up to Farmington CC to catch the second day of our state superintendents annual conference. Pete Wendt, superintendent at Congressional and formally at Woodmont and Kinloch, gave a presentation with Andrew Green about their renovation at Congressional. It was mind boggling the amount of work that went in to that transformation. We are spending $2 million on a whole new irrigation system for the Sabot, they spent $2 million just on engineering work to get started! That project was just on a totally different level and the results are equally as amazing.

Back here on planet earth we continued with our in house bunker renovation. 3 more concrete trucks gave us 27 more cubic yards of concrete to finish up 10 greenside on Thursday.

It takes about 14 Progator loads of concrete to empty 9 yards of concrete out of 1 truck. The mix is spread out 2 inches thick across the bottom of the bunker.

All 3 bunkers around 10 green now have capillary concrete in them and are ready for sand.

We started putting sand on top of the small section on 10 that was laid last week. 8 trucks of bunker sand arrived this week so we'll be working Friday to fill up as much as possible here on 10.

The drainage was completed on the back left bunker on 3 green Thursday morning.

About half of the third concrete truck made it out to the bunker on 3. We'll finish up here next week on Tuesday with more concrete. After 3 comes a big job on 2, completing all 5 of the remaining bunkers there. We are way ahead of schedule here thanks to the warmer weather!