grass and greens as well as a state of the art irrigation system have been added the club has a rich history gracing this beautiful area for more than eighty five years playing host to the p g a tour and the st paul open as well as to national p g a championship and the ladies p g a tour in one nine hundred ninety six keller begin to minimize their impact on the environment and restore and preserve its unique natural features they are committed preserving the gulf experience and establishing an urban preserve on the property management practices now as a multiple benefits to the course and to the natural environment the ramsey washington metro watershed district recognized killer for environmentally friendly practices along with fairways and greens the natural areas are part of the failing chain of lakes watershed this one provides critical habitat and improve these us spray painted boxes all right those are our planting areas our plots and each of these brave painted boxes there's a tray with some plants on it about twenty four plants so those are the plants that we would like you guys to put in the ground here so in order to get going here what i'm going to do is start by taking out a plant to get it out of the tray in the bush from the bottom and then gently poll teller golf course and were first thing and you can see that even though this doesn't look too great there's a lot of root material here that stuff is those plants got to have a lot of strong roots going and that's the important thing that we've got the master gardeners here to help paul he is the superintendent of color golf course and he's going to pose that about the golf course and why we're here today ok thank you simba as some have said my name is paul on the golf course superintendent here keller golf  course and you're here to help us today plant native plants and some of our short grass prairie areas let me tell you a little bit about killer golf course it's located on one hundred fifty acres and we are audubon cooperative sanctuary i don't know if you know what that means you know who james audubon was when he was really big and in nature and birds  what that means is that we are a facility a gulf a silty here that works with nature not against nature we try to do all kinds of positive things to enhance the ecosystem here and we take care of the golf course we try to use friendly practices for nature so that makes sense ok like this area here this is a short grass prairie area and we have these kind of areas all over the golf course that we've put in over the years we also have all kinds of other neat things going on like the bluebird trail we have lots and lots of blue birds out here we have a butterfly garden yes we have all kinds of interpretive signs over here for the golfers to tell them show them what we're doing out here to try and educate them the golf course just underwent a major renovation so everything got redone new grasses new irrigation system do you want to hear about the irrigation system ok it's li yeah did you see that big pond down there oh yeah that's brand new it's like one of the half acres and it's like twenty feet deep and we're going to get we're going to put fish into it yeah and we already started  well i should say watershed district has already started naturalizing the perimeter of that pond with native plant material and the more material we get in here the more that the the birds and the animals will like to use it becomes more friendly for them as far as irrigation system goes we have over a thousand heads over here thousand year occasion heads and they're sunk in the ground and then there's pipe that runs under the ground and each one of those heads the computer in my office down in the main that shot it controls each and every one of those heads individually so if we have a dry area and we need to put a little bit more water on that i tell the computer to put more water on it it does if we have a wet area and we don't want so much water we turn it back so it's individual head control so it's really kind of neat that we have a onsite weather station here which tells us how much water we're losing to the that number and tells us how much water we've lost to the atmosphere and then we know how much we have to replace without using too much we also have in ground soil sensors throughout the golf course the tell us how much water is actually in the ground and how much water the roots are able to get at so that once again helps us tell home much water to put on a golf course so we don't waste any so any questions which is a lot of different kinds of birds that we have all kinds of mammals we have deer out here we have fox we have coyotes we have all kinds of little critters that loved to live in this short grass prairie little rodents you know like field mice and voles and shrews and what likes to feed on those yeah what else platform you know law spray is it's a fish eagle they eat fish out of the lakes they're the ones that you can see flapping above the water and looking for fish when they see one they dive into the water and grab it and then they go off to their nest and eat it and that's what we're trying to get some ospreys to nest up there and have a little osprey but we haven't been successful yet but we have had two years ago we had two pairs fighting over that platform for about ten days that was pretty cool but then they left so it was a bomb or yeah yeah so yeah that's what that is dillinger and his associates fellow gang members used to golf out here back in the early thirty's you know they had to recreate to and the story goes that one day they were out here playing golf and the f b i got word that they were playing golf out here and came to the golf course and john and his gang saw the f b i coming and they dropped their clubs and started running and there's a old track on the other side of the golf course and a railroad train train happened to be coming by and they jumped on that train and they got away sure we have a system down at the maintenance building where we wash off our equipment ok when our equipment comes in like our morse come in from the golf course and they're full of grass and they might have a little grease saam or even some pesticide possibly who knows but we don't want that going into the lakes so we have a system down there where when it gets washed off the water in the grass clippings go into this trench and the grass clippings get filtered out separated from the water and dumped into a big cart and we compost those grass clippings the water then goes into these big thousand gallon tanks and those tanks have bacteria in them and this is special kind of bacteria they break down the bad stuff in the water the gasoline the grease the pesticides those are called hydrocarbons it breaks them down into carbon hydrogen and oxygen and then discharges into the sanitary sewer and it's very clean water so that water doesn't make its way into the surface waters like keller lake which is very important the other thing we do is all our water bodies we've naturalize those with native plant material so those is big borders around these waters and that filters any kind of runoff that's headed towards those waters and cleans out water before it gets into the the ponds so yeah there's quite a bit of interest there really is i would say all the majority of people are oblivious to to most of it you know i've heard like the prairie segments called you know weed patches and things like that multiple times but it's an ego that was an eagle did you see that a bald eagle and those eagles like to come over here to the golf course and sit in the trees and perch in the trees we see them all the time so any other questions ok thank you for coming appreciate your hard work second i'm going to push that thing in really hard ok so i've got one plant in the ground i want to put in another all right teasing out the roots again looking at this  add a little swell yes prairie smoke the clubhouse and ballroom are available for private when it's a great location for weddings rehearsal dinners business movies and special events