High and Dry

It is time for dancing lessons!  Rain dancing lessons that is.  We are now having our main irrigation supply of re-use water from the effluent plant shut off almost every other day now.  I have to hand it to Erick though, the course is looking no the worse for the wear considering.  Erick has been doing a great job in managing the water very judiciously.  When he can't run the big sprinklers, Erick sends out a team of guys to hand water.

The guys use a special adaptor to tap into the sprinkler heads with a hose to apply the water where it is needed.  This type of application is 100% efficient.  The difficult part is getting enough hoses going to be able to cover the entire golf course.  After hand watering with a hose, the employee reinstalls the sprinkler head and flags the head so the Assistants can go back around and check to make sure the irrigation head is in correctly.

On my last posting I talked about the use of wetting agents and how they break the surface tension of water to increase infiltration.  When someone at the course hand waters they are using wetting agents also.  Instead of spraying them on the ground, we use a tablet in a hose end applicator.  Notice the upside down clear jar with the white tablet sticking up out of the ground.  Applying the wetting agent this way is very accurate in the application of the material.  You can always tell if the person hand watering is using a wetting agent while using a hose because it makes the water looks sudsy.  

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If you were wondering why the fountain on 16 tees was off, here you can see why.  The fountain motor is sitting on the bottom of the lake and is causing the float to stick up above the water.  I turned the electricity off so the motor wouldn't run and suck up a bunch of debris into the fountain assembly and possibly damage the impellor.