"Nowadays, business is all about productivity - and our folks produce." - North Dakota U.S. Senator John Hoeven

North Dakota's Junior U.S. Senator, John Hoeven, was the governor of North Dakota from 2000 through 2010.  During his time as governor of the Peace Garden State he helped usher in an era of economic and social service expansion unique among the other 49 states.  Thanks in large part to a boom in energy production in his state North Dakota ranks at the top in fiscal responsibility and economic security.  I wish we could say the same for Illinois but that's not why I bring up Sen. Hoeven's quote.  I wanted to talk about the productivity our team brings out on the golf course and hotel grounds.

 Escobar, Rivera, Santiago and Chily hittin' the sticks

They really do deserve a bit of golf after a hard day's work, I think.  Our team starts at 5:00 in the morning.  Escobar, as an example, starts his day cleaning the driving range tees of debris (divots, tees, garbage, etc) and then transitions into hose dragging fairways for dew removal.  After he finishes that he will then spend the rest of the day fixing ballmarks, filling tee divots, straightening/moving ropes and stakes or a variety of other tasks.  PRODUCTIVITY.  That's what I call productive.

 Chily displays his homemade weed eating protective gear

Chily will begin his day mowing fairways, mowing tees, collars, or raking bunkers.  He'll move on to string trimming around ponds, trimming trees or mulching beds at the hotel.  This guy produces, let me tell you.  To look at him I'd say he appears to be in his early 20's but he's actually 42.  Go figure.

 Standing water on 3 Island green after THREE MINUTES of irrigation!

 Barrett, Ernesto and Dale sod cutting the damaged turf

 Barrett and Dale backfill the excavation with sand

 A close up view of the soil here.  Challenging to say the least

 A long view of the finished product

Ernesto, Barrett and Dale did a fine job of addressing one of our biggest challenges on the Island course last week.  Three minutes of irrigation represents roughly .05" of precipitation given our irrigation system's design.  If you have that much standing water on a putting surface after that little amount of precipitation, imagine what it would be like if you had roughly 9" of rainfall from July 22nd until August 15th.  This area is especially sensitive given it is at the front of the green where every golfer will basically walk right over this exact same spot over and over again for days on end.  This is merely one step in a long term solution.  All of our greens need internal drainage installed but this is the most pressing and we will find a solution to the standing water problem one way or another.  The sod job is only a band aid until the water can be moved off the putting surface reliably.  You can see more of spots like this on a much smaller scale on 1, 4, 5, 6, and 9 on the Island course as well.

It's important to note that Barrett, Ernesto and Dale only spent half a day on this project.  Their earlier assignments include course set-up, mowing collars and intermediate rough as well as chemical applications. 

 Grass clumps

 Grass Clumps.....again....

Grass clumps.....some more....sigh....

I would imagine that some of you at home are having a hard time keeping up with the mowing requirement for your lawn.  Now imagine your lawn is 300 acres.  It's no different for us.  The beautiful weather we've been having (low nighttime and daytime temperatures with a little rainfall) has produced some lush, green turf but it grows LIKE CRAZY!  Just in case you were wondering, no, we don't fertilize our rough.  It just GROWS!  Dennis, Chongo, Jimenez, Rivera, and Santiago spend the early part of the morning mowing or blowing greens.  They spend the mornings cleaning hotel trash, cleaning the patio and the tents or prepping the golf course for early morning outings.  Once that is complete and things have dried out a bit later in the morning they'll spend much of the day trying to keep up with the seemingly endless mowing requirement.  They are great examples of how we can be productive.  These guys work hard, lemme tell ya!

Angel and Anthony preparing to get after some string trimming at the hotel

 This is another good example of teamwork.  After a particularly busy day for Angel and Anthony mowing fairways (46 Acres of fairway, to be exact) they had an hour or so left in the day.  That left enough time to help out Engineering extraordinaire Dan Ayres by clearing a nice swath along the golf course side of the hotel so the Engineering team could repair some foundation leaks for the conference rooms.  We have a good team and I am always short on words for how to thank them for their efforts but here we go: Thank you, all of you, for the effort and hard work you bring each day.

My daughter, Molly, is 9 months now.  Time flies when you're having fun!

Tom, now 3 1/2, dancing his heart out at Pritzker Pavilion in June

I am a firm believer in being a cheap date.  There's too much to do that doesn't cost money in our part of the world not to take advantage of it.  The above photo was taken during a Justin Townes Earle free concert in Chicago Memorial Day weekend.  You can catch "Million Dollar Quartet" at the Pritzker Pavilion for free next week.  That's something you don't want to miss.  If you look hard enough the world is at your fingertips.  My wife, Tina, deserves all the credit for finding all this stuff out.  Have a great weekend.

CB 

"Quoting: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another" - Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1913)

Ambrose Bierce was a prominent essayist, journalist and satirist who was known for being a bit of a grump.  The quote of this particular entry is dedicated to a colleague of mine who wondered to me the other day about the obscurity of not only the quotes I choose, but also of the people who are quoted.  This one's for you, JB!

I won't bore you with too much in the way of a narrative so I'll get right to pictures and explanations:

Fairways, greens and tees came out of growth regulation this week!

We use growth regulators on greens, tees and fairways every ten days to three weeks depending on  many factors.  I choose to do this in an effort to save on mowing frequency and the ensuing benefits of not mowing (labor, fuel, equipment wear specifically).  Our rainfall total from 7/22 through 7/29 was 7".  7"!  That is more than double the monthly July average.  We were unable to apply preventive fungicides and growth regulators during this time period.  As a result we saw fair to significant disease breakthrough on tees and fairways and everything was outside of regulation.  The above picture represents 1 acre of fairway grass.  Our yield was about 2 yards of clippings per acre.  That's alot.

I forget I am 6'6" tall sometimes.  Chily needed some help getting to the dump truck bed

Angel is dispersing clippings with our topdresser

We only have one dump truck so our other fairway mowing team utilized our pull-behind topdresser to dump clippings and spread them in the rough.  It was a lot of grass!

Pythium injury on an untreated fairway

We normally treat for this particularly devastating disease preventively but the significant rainfall coupled with exceptionally hot weather (a repeat of last July, if you'll remember) precluded us from spraying.  Hence excessive growth and disease breakthrough.  Disease was minimal on tees, non-existent on greens and sporadic on fairways.  

  Brown Patch on an untreated fairway

This little ring here is present during the same environmental conditions as pythium.  Temperatures would be at, near or above 90 during the day and at, near or above 70 overnight.  Couple these temperatures with 7" of rain and you literally have a perfect storm for disease breakthrough.  The good news is it has cooled off, all turf has been treated for these diseases and recovery is already occurring.  

 

The above picture illustrates the impact marginal soils (the straight lines) and standing water from horrific environmental conditions (high heat, humidity, excessive rainfall).  The straight lines are an old cartpath that was bulldozed and grassed over in 2001.  The circle is a low spot in the fairway that takes longer to drain than the surrounding turf.  The injury present here is not disease but rather direct injury from high temps and standing water.  Quite literally the grass boiled.

Commonly referred to as 'operator error'

Since I was the operator in this instance you can all laugh at me now.  I treated this area in the spring with a combination product of fertilizer and crabgrass control.  The circle clearly shows where I whiffed.  Let this be a lesson to those of you at home: Prevention is always the best option when treating for grassy weeds.  Oh yeah, the guy shown below helped me out getting the stuff:

Feliciano trimming around the East Pavilion

The hotel grounds staff was able to make some headway detailing around the East Pavilion in the last week and began the West Pavilion as well.  John Pascente....

 
....has really improved the hotel grounds appearance and the staff has done a great job under his guidance. 

Not  a good picture but I wanted to mention it:

Standing water on a putting green after .3" of rain this morning is never a good thing.  Our greens are 'native soil' or 'push-up' construction.  There is no internal drainage, the soils are all inconsistent from green to green and sand topdressing depths are all different as well.  In the coming months I hope to have a few options/solutions in place to address this particular concern.

Felipe cleaning bird droppings off signage at the hotel

Some of you reading may have a solution to this problem but birds seem to think that signage is their own private little toilet!  This really is irritating.

Our resident divot expert, Escobar, at work in his laboratory

We use yard waste compost for divot filling and Escobar spearheads divot filling on the golf course and on the driving range tees.  I don't know what it is about compost but the truth is the seedlings fly out of the ground when we use it.  Admittedly it isn't as pretty as green sand or some other mixes but darned if it isn't effective.  Since we began using compost for divots our seed use has been cut in half because we don't need to add as much per unit volume as we did with sand or sand mixes!

I don't know what bug this is but I thought it looked cool so I took a picture

I became tired of looking at these things.....

So I cut them down.  It really cleans things up, I think

Alright, that's too much for today.  We have finished a busy week and are heading into a busy week next week.  8/1 through 8/7 had one 100 player tournament and 6 shotguns!  It's about all we can do to mow, rake and clean and get the heck out of the way.  8/8 through 8/14 will see 3 shotguns and 6 small (20 to 56 player) tournaments.  Yeesh!  It's great business for the company, for sure.  Thanks, one and all for coming out!

 My son, Tom, at a great playground in Chicago

My daughter, Molly, and wife, Tina, enjoying 'at home' time

Thanks everyone if you made it this far to see the great pictures of my family.  I don't know where the time went but Tom is 3 1/2 years old now and Molly's first 8 months really, really flew by.  Until next time be excellent to each other!  Thanks.