Transcription
Well, hello and long time no see. I'm down here in the woods today to try to get out of the wind, also talking directly into this mic to make sure that you can hear me clearly and I don't pick up anything else. There's a lot of nature activity down here, which is beautiful and awesome. But usually, the microphones pick up a lot. So, I'm going to try to do my best here on getting a direct voice-over to you.
So, I thought today, just quickly at the beginning of this video, I'm going to try to make this short if I can, just tell you a little bit about where I've been, what's been going on, and all of that. So, you can first off see that I have this little brace on my hand. You're probably going to be seeing it in the video and wondering what that is. I decided to somehow tip my four-wheeler over, and to try to prevent myself from getting crushed on it, I had to put my arm down. And of course, I, uh, did a little damage to the wrist. So, that was about 4 weeks ago now. Still not quite there. So, I'm still wearing the brace just to protect it a little bit more, and hopefully, that's going to be healing soon.
So, you probably haven't seen any videos for a while, and, uh, that really stems from a few things. One of them being that last year was a very, very difficult year for my wife and I. We had three of our dogs pass away in a 10-month period. If you've been following for a while, you know that we rescue Westies, their West Highland white terriers, and usually, we take on some special needs ones or things of that nature. So, we had two of them that were sick that ended up passing away, and then our 17-year-old passed away unexpectedly in the winter time. He was doing great, but then one day he fell out of bed and actually ruptured a growth that was inside that we didn't know was there. And so, at that point, there really wasn't much that we could do. For any of you who have animals who have lost animals, and especially for us, they are absolutely 100% our family. And so, losing three of them in that time span was just, I think it was a little more devastating than we expected it to be. So, that's one thing.
Two is that I started this channel in 2016, but it really got ramped up from about 2018 on up until the last couple seasons. And in that time frame, I've made nearly 700 videos. So, I knew the long term that that wasn't a pace that I could keep up forever. I really wanted to try to get a catalog of things and try to cover all the topics that I wanted to cover, and then hopefully slow that down over time. Well, that basically just came out of a necessity that I had to start slowing it down this season. And one, because of what I just talked about, and two, just physically and mentally, I needed to start looking after myself a little bit more and not working 14 to 16 hours a day every single day like I have been for the last few seasons, 7 days a week during all of the lawn season. So, I decided that I needed to pull back on that, get some other things in order, start to reduce my stress levels, and start to look at whether or not this whole thing that I'm doing is my long-term plan or whether I want to set my sails on to something else.
To be honest, the fact that I'm still doing this right now is kind of a miracle. And my wife would tell you that I'm usually a 3 to 4-year person. I climb that mountain. I get to the top of that mountain, and then I start coming down the other side, and I look at what's on the other side and start climbing another one. So, I'm at sort of at that point right now where the path is sort of veering off. I'm not sure exactly where it is going. I still enjoy working on all of the grass and everything that I do here, but it is an immense amount of work just to maintain our property, let alone me film everything, do all of the editing. I mean, pretty much the last few years, I would be outside from the time that I went out until the time that it's dark, and sometimes after. Then I'd go sit at my computer and stay up until 2, 3:00 a.m. working on editing. Do that all over and over and over again. And so, that's something that I just had to change and something that I've slowed, and I'm going to try to figure out a pace going forward where when I want to film something, when I have a project going that I really feel like I want to show, I have some time to do that and not go so much into the rat race.
So, also the other thing is, is that YouTube has really changed drastically since I started. Obviously, everything has moved a lot more towards short-form content, as you know. And then I think also that it's really all driven by suggested videos on YouTube. And I think I've heard from a lot of people in the last couple seasons who say, "I don't see your videos pop up anymore and recommended," or "I don't even see any of them anywhere as far as suggested to me." And really, that's completely out of my control and any creator's control as to what's going on with that. And so, things that's going to get engagement are clickbait and thumbnails that have that type of look to them. And then also something that's controversial or gets people arguing in the comments is frankly, sadly, rewarded in a lot of senses. And that's never a world that I wanted to be in. It's never something that I really wanted to be a part of. And so, I'm just also looking at that side of it and noticing that a lot more of my comments that come in on a daily basis are just very negative things. It was not this way in the past. And then I start to think to myself like, why am I doing all of this work and putting out this free content for people when they just want to tell me that I don't know what I'm doing. I'm horrible. Blah, blah, blah.
This golf course thing has been a dream come true for me. It's what my focus is pretty much every day, outside of, like I said, all the rest of the property management that goes on when you own a large property. But I would like to show a little bit more about what's going on with that. I know it's not really largely for the big audience, but it still has a lot of grass aspect to it. So, I think I've just decided that when I feel like filming some of that, I will. And whether or not the audience is really in tune to that, uh, you might not be, but that's kind of where my direction is going as far as what I enjoy right now. And that's also part about being a creator is that you have to be enjoying what you're doing and not just putting in a whole bunch of hours for no reason really at the end. Long ramble on all that, but I wanted to explain today right here at the beginning on what I've been up to.
I will be getting back to look at my brother's project here sometime soon. Hopefully, what I have learned about him is he is never home. Never. So, uh, it's been a little difficult to get back there and figure that out. But, we will get back to the fall part of that coming up soon. And then in today's video, show a little bit more about the golf area, what's been going on with that, and then we'll see what's on the horizon. So, I thank you for sticking around and let's get to it.
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We often joke that there must be a dome around our property. Rain goes to the north or the south or really anywhere except our place. That wasn't the case this past week for an evening of heavy rain that lingered into the next morning.
[Music]
But finally, the skies cleared and the sun came out again.
[Music] [Music]
3.90 inches.
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And looks like I have some trimming to do, but let's be honest, I could be doing that all day long here.
[Music]
The green handled all that water better than I expected, honestly. So, all of the way that this thing slopes and the way that it runs water off is actually working very, very well. So, I'm very pleased. Little bit of groundwater here, I think. Maybe we'll leave that open. See if you can see it right here. But there's still just water running down into this culvert. And it has not rained in hours and hours now. So, probably partially coming out of the ground. I have a lot of water down at the bottom of this hill. And it's kind of amazing how much water there can be.
Nothing too extremely exciting going on today. Uh, pretty much like usual. Just a lot of maintenance that happens, a lot of mowing that happens, a lot of brush mowing that happens. And now we have some areas that I need to clean up. Some weeds. Did some spraying today before it got windy, and then like usual here in the afternoon, a lot of the times it's pretty windy to where I can't do a lot of spraying and other things. So, I have to be pretty particular about when I can do all that stuff. But today, very fun task of hand-picking some of these weeds out of here. Of course, I could come spray stuff here too, but close to these grasses, I just want to make sure I don't damage them because they're really looking nice. But good to get some areas done that I'm preparing to seed for, uh, some fall renovation stuff that's not too far around the corner now. So, like an area right over here, this whole thing all just full of weeds. I got that sprayed today. I am going to be doing some more fine fescue as a border to the turf here. Absolutely love the way that this fine fescue has turned out. You can see that right there. Just has such a beautiful look in the wind. Very traditional European, uh, links style type of thing, or a lot of us here that live in this climate as well here in the Midwest. We have a lot of rough areas at golf courses that have all of that fine fescue. But I just love, love the way that's turned out. So, I'm going to do some more of that. Have it all throughout here too, just not quite as, uh, you can tell though where it's in the sun compared to where it's in the shade most of the time, and just kind of the difference there. Got more of it here on the well, and then over and see some over there. Some border stuff. So, going to be utilizing a lot more of this. Might actually do some drastic things up on the fairway with it, but we'll see.
[Applause]
So, you might remember I was having some issues with that Toro that I got last year. So, I ended up finding this as a backup, which turned into actually being my main machine because I just like it way more. Works way better for me. It has a brush on it as well, which I have used from time to time. Kind of helps to brush the grass up before it gets cut. Really like this machine. I don't really know exactly how old it is, but it's definitely been used at a golf course and used well, but it's been cutting great for me. I just back-lapped this not too long ago. Okay, got it cutting all across, but I definitely think I could back-lap it again. When you ever have sand on there, you're always hitting just tiny little bits here and there. There's not really much you can do about it. And might need to back-lap that again just to make sure it's getting sharp.
[Applause] [Music] [Music]
I've absolutely loved the experience of doing this green and it's a dream come true for me to have this at my house to be able to come down here. And that's what I'm going to do tonight. I triple-cut today just because of the rain. I didn't get to cut in the last couple days. So, I did a triple-cut today. Basically, get it as fast as I can. I'm going to check this real quick here, too. I'm just trying to avoid hitting the sand and basically getting it as low as I can till everything gets completely filled back in. And then I might bring it a little bit lower yet. Hopefully, as we get towards a few of the events that I have coming up. Just some fun stuff with friends and stuff. So, really, really love the way that it's looking. I have PGR on here right now as far as growth regulator. Uh, actually looks like it probably could go a little bit more as far as how many clippings I'm getting off of here. But I definitely had a lot of rain, which is going to make it grow fast too. So, we'll see how it goes in the next couple days. But, I've been getting the regulator on it. I was gone for about 5 days, and I had fungicide app on there just for when I was gone, but it's looking schmick.
One thing I also wanted to do today was switch out this flag. A couple years ago, I was invited to the John Deere Classic golf tournament to do a bunch of filming behind the scenes with the turf crew and kind of see what goes on at a professional golf tournament. They allowed me to be there all while they did maintenance during the tournament. It was incredible. And in case you haven't seen that video, definitely I will link it and check it out. I personally believe it's the best video that I've ever made, but because YouTube is YouTube, uh, it wasn't seen by a ton of people, but personally, I believe it's one of my best that I've ever done. So anyway, I got a flag from Deer Run, a friend that I met there that works there and sent me this, an old flag of theirs. So, I'm going to fly it proudly here today and put it out on my course.
[Music] [Music]
So, today I'm going to mow the tee boxes and then I'm going to explain a little bit more about this front yard golf thing, how it all plays, and how it all works. Uh, but so I'm using my 1600 here for the tees. They do have PGR on them, but because of all that rain that we got, they're going to need some more. It looks like I just did one initial app a few, uh, few days before that rain. And I'd like to keep these so I don't have to mow them so much. So, I'll probably coming up I will explain what I'm doing with that and, uh, what I'm using for it. And then we're also going to take this down by the green and mow a collar in today. I've done it before, but I did it in the spring, and it just grows so fast that I couldn't keep up with it very well. So, I decided I'd wait until a little later into the season, get some PGR on that as well to try to slow the growth down so that I don't have to bring this mower down there every time. So, uh, you might not think it is very far, but about 1,000 feet of driveway, and I don't have any carts or anything to move these machines around. So, I either have to drive them down there. Um, it's not as fun as it sounds. We'll put it that way.
[Music] Heat up here. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music]
So, what is the front yard golf course? So, a lot of people when I explain this to them, they don't quite get it as far as how this whole thing plays and how it all plays out with just one green, but with nine tees. Obviously, at the bottom of the hill here, we have the green, and a friend and I moved a whole bunch of soil from a different part of my property down to this area. He helped me shape it the way that we want to. It doesn't show a lot on camera, but there's quite a bit of slope in it in a few different regions, and so it makes it fun and not as flat as it appears maybe on camera. There were some junky trees and things that we took out kind of where this little makeshift pond is now, which turned out to be something that I just did this spring. There was a low spot down there that was kind of wet, and so it started digging with the skid steer and eventually just ended up with a much bigger hole than I anticipated. And, uh, the way the water runs down this hill, I've been able to direct some of it into there now and top it off with my well every once in a while when it gets low. But it does leak just slightly because there's no liner in it or anything. So, may need to fix that in the future. But for now, very fun to have a little water feature here. And of course, the pond dye in there to make it nice and blue.
Then up here on this main fairway, you can probably tell it's a bit stressed out right now. Up until we got this rain just a few days ago, it was very, very dry. I don't have any in-ground irrigation on this. And it's 100% ryegrass on this big 60, 65,000 square feet of fairway up here. So, kind of in recovery mode with that. It'll get there as long as we keep up some of this rain. And I do have a sprinkler that I go out and move around, but it's just not enough to keep up with it in the middle of summer to make it look 100% perfect like it does usually in spring and fall. But hopefully, of this up above view here now, you can see the tee boxes. So, I have nine different tees that play down to that green. And the first one that's closest is the ninth tee. This one is pretty much everyone's favorite that plays out here. It is my favorite as well. It is 90 yards from this tee box down to the green. And you got the wildflowers out there. You got that little makeshift pond. You will have some fine fescue that's growing in right now that'll be growing up around that. So, just a nice wispy kind of taller grass look around this tee, and it's basically feels a bit like you're out on an island hitting over, just because of the elevation change too. The green is quite a bit lower than these tees. And as it goes up the hill, it does feel kind of like you are elevated above everything. So, it's kind of cool that way. But then as you go up the hill, you got 90 yards there from number nine. And you'll see the different tee boxes staggering left to right. There is a pattern to all of these. And so, you don't just play them in a row. You actually move around left to right side and different distances. So, that makes it fun. And then you go up the hill all the way to the farthest one is 225 yards. And then actually, we have a bonus tee, which is number 10. Sometimes we play that after nine. If you feel like you want one more, then right outside our front door, you can actually play that one. And that one is 240 yards. So, for me, that's about driver. And if you want to try to drive it down there, you got to be pretty accurate because the other part of this is that you don't have a lot of room left to right. You got a cornfield on one side, you have cow pasture on the other side, so it's fairly tight to get the ball into here. That makes it more challenging and makes it more fun. Also, the tee boxes are not 100% flat because you're mostly playing off of the tees. I didn't want to move a whole bunch of dirt around to try to flatten these out, but also it just makes it a little bit more challenging because you got some sidehill lies. You have a little bit of a downhill lie on some of them. So, there's a little extra challenge for people, which has turned out to be actually very, very fun.
With this whole fairway in general, I would like to in the future possibly incorporate some more fine fescue, taller grasses, native grasses, those types of things. Maybe cut down on the amount of turf I have out there so that I could get some in-ground irrigation around some of the tee boxes. Maybe make a fairway that's a little bit smaller because right now all of this grass, beautiful, love it, but it's kind of just there for looks. You don't really play much of the golf off of the fairway because you're all on the tee boxes. And every once in a while, you do. So, I would keep some of it down towards the ninth tee, or I would keep a small fairway down the middle probably for looks as well. But maybe in the future, I will figure out how to incorporate some of that taller grass into here and also be able to possibly get some watering, in-ground watering on it. So, it could be a bit more automated. But these are all things that I've learned over time is that the ideas that you have don't come to fruition right away because just how much work it is on this amount of space. And so, I'm very, very pleased with what's happened in a year. The green was not there last year. The turf around it, except for my plots and all of that, uh, was not the way that it was. So, all of this has happened in a pretty short amount of time, and I'm actually very pleased with how all that's turned out. But more things coming with that in the future. Some changes I think to make it a little bit more golf-like out front, I guess, in the fairway area, if you will.
So, what's in store for the future? Well, shipping container. Everyone complains about the shipping container, and it has been in the state that it's in for a long time just because I've been much more worried about the turf than trying to fix that thing and putting it low on my priority list. Now it's starting to get up on the priority list. So, that's going to be either getting painted. I may end up swapping it for something that's a little newer and seeing if I can sell this one off, or we're just going to see what happens. But that's going to be a clubhouse. It's going to store some of my equipment, real mowers in there still, but going to have an area for people to, uh, sit around if we're doing a putting contest or chipping contest, hang out there at night, maybe put a little fire pit down there. Um, that's my plan for it. So, it does have a plan. It does look bad, but it will eventually here get changed fairly quickly, I hope.
I also have a whole back nine that was in the works. Kind of put the brakes on that just a little bit because we are possibly changing a few things back here with some excavation work and, uh, directing some water around and doing some things. So, I do have a green back here. It's not being mowed low right now. I do have a dogleg fairway. It's got cover crop in it, and I'm trying to get all that cleaned out, but the green may end up having to move a little bit, and it's actually kind of sloped the wrong direction as far as the way that the ground was laying. So, I may change it in the future anyway. But these are all future projects, some future things for me to work on. I've been much more focused on the front. Trying to get some of that finished. We're going to put some more landscaping in coming up and kind of beautifying the area around all of the turf as we go. So, little things. Now, we're getting to just the nitpick stuff down there, which is the fun part when you have the majority of the major lifting of all that turf stuff done. So, back nine hopefully in the future will be there, but I'm not putting any rush or timeline on it. The farthest tee back there playing onto an actual fairway would be 400 yards. And so, that would allow you to play a normal hole and then also set up tee boxes at lesser distances, kind of basically similar to the front where you have some different challenges and things.
So, lots and lots and lots of work on a daily basis goes into all of this, and, uh, it's definitely a labor of love, but it's been a dream of mine for a very, very long time that has come to fruition through a lot of hard work and effort here. And at the end of the day, when you see what you can do, that's what makes all of the work worth it. So, today, again, I appreciate you coming along and sticking around and watching this video. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time.