Disheartening Irony

As I mentioned in my previous post, we suffered some turf loss due to "too much, too long" referring to the heat, humidity, and water on the golf course.  Since that post, the humidity has pretty much left along with all excess water from the course, although the heat remains.  Good news, right? Well not entirely.  When I say the humidity left, I mean it really left!  We have been experiencing ET's (evapotranspiration - a numerical value that refers to the amount of water lost during a day due to evaporation and plant transpiration) in the 0.3" range for over a week now.  That basically means we have to supplement 0.3" of water just to break even, more to re-hydrate the soil.  Currently, I am watering to the maximum capability of our irrigation system, about 320,000 gallons of water per night.  It takes our system from 9pm to nearly 7am to put out this amount of water due to the supply situation at the pumphouse.  With all of this water being used, I struggle to match the 0.3" of water. 

Now to the irony...  we have been seeing the worst wilt and dry turf around the areas where we lost turf due to an overabundance of water!  I believe this is largely due to a compromised root system from the heat and saturated soils.  So here I am watering the "wet spots" to prevent further turf loss!  Frustrating to say the least.

We have been seeding into the areas where the turf will not recover and will continue to do so until we make it through the entire golf course.  With cooperative weather I would expect this to be by the end of this week.