Friday, November 11, 2016

How Golf Course Irrigation Is Done

By Virginia Bennett


Irrigation refers to the process of applying controlled quantity of water to plants at regular intervals. The act of using artificial means to supply water to crops has been in existence for several centuries now. Some of the earliest civilizations such as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and the Roman Empire thrived on their ability to irrigate crops to boost agricultural productivity.

Today, better methods of irrigating plants have been invented to replace the old, labor intensive methods used in the past. Initially, irrigation was mostly done to support the growth of agricultural crops, but that has changed as the process is used for several other purposes. One of the new uses of irrigation is maintenance of landscapes. Golf course irrigation is mostly done to maintain the landscape.

Irrigation is also done to revegetate soils in dry areas, which have been disturbed and to suppress the growth of weeds. In addition, lands are irrigated to offer plants protection from frost and to prevent soils from consolidating. Systems used for irrigating may also be used for other purposes such as disposing sewage and suppressing dust in mining and other operations.

So far, three types of methods of irrigating land have been invented. These methods are in-ground irrigating, sub-surface irrigating, and surface irrigating. The commonest of all the three methods is surface irrigating. One of the main subtypes of surface irrigating is the use of sprinklers. Sprinklers are very efficient and convenient, which makes them to be used widely on golf courses.

The working of sub-surface irrigating makes it to be used in rare cases only. The land is irrigated by raising the water table. The soil in which plants are grown is moistened by water from the water table. The amount of moisture supplied is often regulated by incorporating drainage infrastructure into the system. This method is in common use on river courses and in lowlands on permanent grasslands.

In in-ground irrigating system, all of the systems used for supplying water to the grass are buried below the ground. The pipes, sprinklers, irrigating valves, and emitters are all hidden below the ground. This allows for the achievement of a cleaner and more presentable landscape that does not have any items that need to be moved around manually. However, maintenance is usually a problem in this system because the landscape may need to be dug to access the systems.

Irrigating systems are usually divided into different zones and the various zones are interconnected using pipes and tubes. The reason for dividing the system into zone is to achieve the required level of pressure. Without dividing the course into zones, it would be hard to achieve the required pressure to supply water to the whole area at once.

Each zone is installed with a solenoid valve for controlling the supply of water. The controlling is done through an irrigation controller. The irrigating controller determines when a given zone is to be irrigated and how long the water should be applied.




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