Beautiful morning today and fairways are receiving their second cut of the year. We received 1.6" of rain this weekend, which really greened this up even farther. Above, you can see how heavy the dew was this morning.
With dredging underway, I am testing Club Lake water on an every other week basis. There are two concerns I have about our lake water because after all, this is the source of our golf course irrigation water.
1. My first concern is the water quality itself. Sometimes during dredging projects, nutrients that settled in the sediment can be stirred up, impacting the water. I want to be sure I have a complete understanding of what the water quality is, that is going to be applied to our putting greens.
2. My second area of concern is the water turbidity and what kinds of solids are suspended in the water. This is really important because these solids can clog valuable pore space between the sand particles in the rootzone of our greens.
We are planning to use irrigation water only when absolutely necessary this spring. For comparison, I am pulling water samples near the irrigation intake and then another sample on #10, where water enters the property, before the section of lake that is being dredged. By quantifying these samples, we'll know exactly what the impact dredging is having on water quality.