Irrigation Renovation work on #5 green

New half heads running on #5 green

The most common complaint that I hear about our golf course during the summer months is how wet the green surrounds are.  The amount of water we need to apply to our greens during the heat of the summer causes us to overwater our surrounds due to the improper irrigation design.  The irrigation heads around the greens are fairway heads which are not located in the proper location.  #5 green was the worst of the greens with a couple of the heads being close to 25 feet away from the greens edge.  As we watered the greens at night we were flooding the surrounds around the green making is difficult to walk through these areas, making it almost impossible to play golf, and restricting our ability to maintain the approaches and surrounds on this green.



Rainbird 751 half head in operation



In an effort to correct this problem we moved the heads to the proper position around the greens and installed Rainbird 751 series irrigation rotors for the inside of the green and Rainbird Eagle 900 series irrigation rotors for the perimeter of the green.  The use of the half heads will allow us to apply water only to the green surface using one set of heads and another set of heads to water only the greens surrounds.  The surrounds will no longer be flooded and we will be able to reduce our water input but not overapplying water to the surrounds. Hopefully we will be able to continue improving the golf course over this summer and improving the irrigation on some other greens which also have similar issues.