Parking Lot Treatment December 18, 2016

After a little freezing rain and just a little snow we had to keep on our parking lot and drive in road this weekend. Mentioned in video, but a big thankful to Assistant Superintendent Ryan DeGrendele for being on call Saturday night!

Bunkers! Maintenance and Repair

Bunkers are everyone's favorite part of the golf course, right? That's my attempt at a joke, but in all seriousness if there is one thing the golfer and the maintenance guy can agree on its that bunkers suck. We hate to play out of them, and they can be costly and troublesome to maintain. One of the things that I have put a deal of focus on this past year has been repairing bunkers. In past years, we would spend 1-2 work days just pumping water out of bunkers. In a budget sense that's 32 hours of work spent on pumping out bunkers (two guys and two full days). That's taking time away from other areas on the golf course getting done or finishing up that project we started a couple days ago.

Because of the time spent on pumping bunkers, we changed our focus to alleviating the problem all together. We began putting a 4 man crew together to begin repairing the drainage to our bunkers, starting with the bunkers that drained the slowest. This started in early spring 2016 and is still being worked on (when you have over 150 bunkers it can be a while). For my fellow maintenance guys, you all have a method or know the method for repairing bunker drains. For the person who may not understand the process, well I'm going to run you through it!

The first step is locating the drain underneath the sand. We do this by using a probe or a shovel to find the pea gravel that is covering (or supposed to be covering) the drain. Once the path is located we begin removing the sand and pea gravel from above and around the drain tile.

 

 

 

Once we have exposed the drain, we removed the tile from inside the bunker and we will snake out the exit of the drain. We do this to ensure that the drainage that is outside the bunker has not become clogged with sand or other debris that may have enter the drain over time. We then replace old drain tile with new 4" perforated tile. Also, with the particular bunker in the pictures, we added 3 more herringbones to allow the water not to settle in one spot of the bunker. 

 

 

Now that there is new drain tile in the trenches, and we have added more drain tile, we will then cover the drain tile in pea gravel. We use pea gravel because it acts as kind of a barrier to the sand but is porous enough to allow the water into the drain tile. Once the pea gravel is in place we begin hauling sand to the bunker. In this particular bunker, we removed 60% of the sand in the bunker due to contamination of silt that had been washed into it from rains. We use a fine masonry sand in all our bunkers that we repair, beginning to incorporate this type of sand to all bunkers instead of just greenside bunkers. The goal we achieve is 4" of sand in the bunker uniformly. This depth of sand is ideal for playing conditions to allow the golfer to get under the ball when hitting out of the bunker. As we bring loads of sand into the bunker, we move the sand around and continually smooth and spread the sand with our bunker rake.

 

 



 

 
Once we have checked for 4" depth of sand throughout the bunker, we put our final rake on it and this is the final product.

Welcome to the Old Hickory Golf Club Course Maintenance Blog!

This blog is for anyone involved, interested in getting involved, or just the curious patron to Old Hickory Golf Club or the golf course maintenance industry. I will be periodically posting about projects or events going on with the maintenance department and different club events, both golf and non-golf related. I hope you enjoy an insight into our world of golf course maintenance!