Leaf season is here

With October here now, the next biggest task on the Grounds staff agenda is leaf cleanup. For the next 6 weeks, keeping the course clean will take a significant portion of our time.

One of the most difficult parts of leaf cleanup season is how long it lasts. Leaves have already started to come down, though slowly, and will continue until Thanksgiving. Getting the course clean one day and then showing up again the next day with leaves everywhere as if we never blew them at all, can be discouraging. Add in windy days where the leaves can’t be corralled where we want them no matter how hard we try, and it leaf season can really drag on.

We do have several powerful blowers that do a good job of moving the leaves off fairways, tees and rough. We use smaller blowers for greens and bunkers. It takes a coordinated effort for everyone to work together: smaller blowers move the leaves off the greens, through the bunkers, and out far enough from the bunker edge that the bigger blowers can pass through and continue to push the leaves out further. At that point, it depends on what day it is and what the golf schedule looks like to determine our next step.

We have two distinct processes for leaves. First, is simple cleaning of in-play areas. We blow greens, tees, fairways and bunkers so that golfers aren’t battling through all the leaves just to play. We do not use this strategy as our leaf removal process. Cleaning like this would be for end of the week and weekends, or days when we may have an outing or tournament. This is meant to be faster and allow for the best playing conditions possible. Our second program is where we focus on leaf removal. We still blow all the surfaces, but we don’t focus on making them perfectly clean for playing. Instead, we work on rounding the leaves into piles so that our vacuum can suck them up and haul them to our waste areas. When we are removing the leaves, there will be areas of lower concentration that we skip right over to focus on where the leaves are heaviest. Trying to work on removal during a busy Friday or Saturday would be counterproductive for us and terribly annoying for the golfers. We would be in everyone’s way, the playing surfaces wouldn’t be clean and golf balls would be lost, and we wouldn’t be efficiently managing our time.

Breaking our leaf program into two parts makes it easier to communicate with the staff about what work is to be done. And it provides golfers with the best experience during this fall season.

 

 

We will be reducing down to 1 post per month starting in November. Thank you

 

 

Etiquette Reminder of the Month

Please rake your entire disturbance within the bunker, including all of your footprints, not just the area from where you hit.

Also, as part of a Golf Committee initiative to improve course etiquette, we have included links to videos teaching proper on course etiquette. Please take a moment to watch:

Ball Marks - How to properly repair

Golf Cart tips

 

 

 

See you on the course!

Joe

jvillegas@bwrc.org