First Frost 2017

The first frost of the Fall occurred on Thursday, October 29th.  While this is not what I would call a "Heavy Frost", we did see some frosted areas in the rough.  Our low temperature was 37.  If you look closely at the picture, the grass in the foreground has no frost, but the grass in the distance has a pretty good frost on top.  This frost signals the start of the winter season for the turf, and the grass will start to show the signs by turning brown.  This brown color is not a bad thing at all, just the grass going dormant for the winter.

Bunker Renovation Approved!

Greetings Members,

                I wanted to take a minute to pass along an update that the MCC Board of Directors approved the Bunker Renovation Project for this coming fiscal year!  We plan to renovate all the bunkers on all 27 holes to improve the playability as well as the aesthetics.  This project will be upon us soon, with our contractor planning to start mid-November!

 The plan is to remove the old sand and cloth liner that is currently installed but starting to fail.  Next we will re-shaped the bunkers slightly so that they have more of a grass “face”, and less of a flash of sand.  The end result will give us much flatter, more maintainable bunkers, as well as providing less chance of an uphill or difficult lie in the sand.  We will replace the old cloth liner with a new leading edge technology of bunker liner.  This liner will reduce the amount of man hours involved fixing the bunkers when we receive a heavy rainfall.  We are still trying to determine which new type of sand to select, the choice is down to the sand in the bunker on hole #4, or the sand in the bunker on hole #9.  If you could please give some feedback in the next month on which one is your favorite it would be much appreciated!

We have still not determined what the process is going to be for working around the project, but will give a much more in depth report on how the logistics will work in the coming weeks.  I just wanted to let everyone know that we will be renovating the bunkers soon, and that next summer we will have all new and improved bunkers!

Thank you,

Mark Hayes

Grounds Superintendent  

Here is an example of what the finished product will look like.  You can see how there is more of a grass "face" and less of the sand going up to the top edge, as our bunkers currently do now.