Net Posts

With rain and snow today there is plenty of inside work to be done. 88 net posts for the 44 tennis courts need scraping and painting. Many of the posts are over 100 years old and are still in good condition. Since we lack inside space, we paint posts in areas all over the clubhouse basement including the boiler room, under the porch and hallways.

A New Grounds Movie

Math

4th grade math questions from the Franklin School in West Newton. Can the crew solve as well as the 10 year old? (click on the picture to make it larger)

Spring Must Be Here

Spring is here. The annual delivery of HarTru topdressing has arrived. 22 tons today and 22 tons on Thursday. Getting the large trucks in and out of the parking lot is a challenge every year.

Misc. Pictures from 3/19/10

Erosion on the clay courts repaired with clay soil, Jeff's fun shirt Friday apparel, cleaning topdressing off the clay courts and a new roof on the grounds building.

Various Assignments for Crew

The crew has been at work on varied assignments this week.

Cleaning last year's topdressing off the clay courts.

Wilson using his carpentry skills.

Charlie, Nate and Neil repainted the parking lot.

8 Inches of Rain

Eight inches of rain from the weekend storm caused a few headaches at LCC. The basement of the clubhouse flooded and many of the windscreens that were put up last week were ripped down from the wind. The rain caused a bit of erosion on the clay courts and with the storm drains backed up, they took a while to drain.

Nate the Great

Nate Salmore is one of the new sports turf managers on the LCC grounds staff. Nate brings a lot of clay and grass tennis court experience with him. He worked at Longwood before attending the turf program at UMass and then worked at The Westmoor Club, Essex Covnty Club and The Boathouse. Four clubs with grass tennis courts! He also brings valuable experience from work at Fenway Park and the world famous resort, The Broadmoor, in Colorado Springs, CO.

Poa Adaptation

The light colored grass is Poa annua, the dark colored is creeping bentgrass. Notice how the Poa annua in the middle is consistent and not mixed with the bentgrass. This happens to be the wettest area on grass courts 7-12, which means the soil ends up having less oxygen. The Poa annua can tolerate the anaerobic conditions in growing season better and therefore dominates the area.

The bentgrass is also in a line going north/south, between courts, an area that gets little traffic.

Frost

So far it has been a quiet winter for the grass courts and the clay courts are almost ready for spring renovations, but the winter has taken it's toll on other areas of the club. Most notably fencing. Frost heaves have pushed up some of the fence footings surrounding the courts and they need to be repaired. This entails physically removing the concrete around a fence post with a sledge hammer, pulling the post out and resetting it in at least 3 feet of new concrete. There are a number of posts that moved up almost 6 inches, heaving the surrounding area and cracking the reinforced fence posts.