Countdown to Ignition

After trimming the thousands of Ash trees on the course all summer, our tree limb dumping areas were starting to get a little spread out.  Today I rented a skid steer for an hour just to push the branches up into a pile so that we would have some more area to dump more limbs.  I must say, it really hit me while pushing up the piles how many trees we have trimmed so far this year.  So far there are a total of 4 piles of brush, each about 40 feet across and probably 10-15 feet high.

Deep down inside of me, the pyromaniac instincts of my childhood are welling up with excitement to light all of these.  Once the first good snowfall is on the ground this fall, the propane torches are coming out and the hotdog roasting sticks are getting sharpened.  Stand back, I think they might be a little toasty....

Just Add Water

Seems like a pretty simple concept right?  As a turfgrass manager, one of the most important parts of the turf health equation is balancing water:  don't want too much, and don't want too little.  During the spring months this year we struggled mightily to get as much water off the course as possible.  Two floods and numerous man hours pumping and squeegeeing fairways and bunkers seemed like a never ending battle.  And then, our good friend Murphy (if it can go wrong, it will go wrong) stepped in and shut the faucet off.

Since about June 20th the rains have stopped almost completely and we have been relying on our irrigation system almost every day since that point.  Fortunately this year, as opposed to last, we have enjoyed some temperatures much cooler than normal, which means that having to rely on our irrigation system really hasn't been too bad.  Everyone by now probably knows how much I gripe about our 25 year old piping and sprinkler network, but during a cool summer like this its shortcomings haven't quite shown as badly.

One of the major hurdles however continues to be keeping water in our irrigation pond.  The river pump was out for two weeks in late June and early July because of the summer flood, went back out in the river for 2 weeks, and then had to get pulled again for repairs.  With the river pump out, we have to rely on the gas pumps on 14 to keep our irrigation pond full, which is a very costly, noisy, and ugly compromise.  The river pump was repaired at Acme Electric, but then during reinstallation we discovered that there was an electrical issue with the 460V line that supplies it with power down at the river.

We rented a mini ex for a day to dig up the power wire for the river pump

The wire was buried surprisingly deep, close to 5'.  We discovered that the line
used to run down closer to the river, and at some point must have been
spliced and run to the new panel.

The river pump is up and working again, but even with it running 24/7 it will barely keep up with our irrigation demands.  The pump only provides about 150gpm, which equates to 216,000 gallons per day.  Without any supplemental rainfall, we go through anywhere from about 150,000 to 250,000 gallons per night irrigating the course, depending on the previous day's temperatures.

Furthermore, I discovered a few weeks ago that our irrigation pond is actually leaking quite badly also!  The 16" steel culvert overflow pipe must be rusted out somewhere underwater at the bottom of the pond, meaning we are continually losing about 50gpm out the overflow, or about 72,000 gallons per day.  Do the math on all of this and it means that our river pump cannot keep up with demand, so we will continue to have to run the gas pumps on 14 periodically to keep the pond full.

The pond overflow will leak out about 11,000,000 gallons
during our 150 day irrigation window from mid May
through Mid October.  Definitely a problem we
will be addressing late this fall.

What it really comes down to is that we need to come up with another way to supply water to our irrigation pond.  The river pump is very unreliable and doesn't even meet our water requirements anyway, and the pumps on 14 are an absolute embarrassment to even have out on the course running, not to mention expensive to keep putting gas in.  I will have to do some investigation into some other water supply options over the winter.

On a brighter note, we have taken the time in the last few weeks to add some irrigation heads in some rough areas that have turned toasty brown this summer.  Our irrigation system is laid out in what is called a "double row" grid.  Essentially there are two rows of sprinklers:  one that runs up each side of the fairway.  This does a good job of keeping our fairways irrigated, but a lot of the rough out past 15 feet of the fairway gets pretty torched once it quits raining.

With that, we have been pinpointing some areas in the rough where a lot of shots are played from, and thus it would be nice to have some more friendly turf to play from other than hardpacked dirt and crispy brown grass.  So far we have added heads in between the two fairway bunkers on the right of 6, in the right rough just short of 14 green, in the left rough along the cartpath up by 15 green, and in the left rough at the top of the hill on 18.  It was easy to add heads in these areas in particular due to existing irrigation lines that we simply tapped into.

The new head installed between the fairway bunkers on 6.  It is a Rainbird 1100
and puts out 61gpm in a 205' circle.  It is what we refer to as a "water cannon"

Adding a new head in the left rough of 15 to help water the dry turf
where the old bunker used to be.

Other areas we are targeting to add irrigation heads soon are in the left rough by the cartpath and bunker by 18 green, at the end of 17 fairway by the red tee box, across the bridge on the green side of 17 along the creek edge, and between 1, 6, and 10 green.

Tree Trimming

Someday I need to take an actual count of how many trees we have at GFCC.  It has to be well into the thousands.  While the trees add a lot of character to our golf course, they also require a lot of work.  Besides just cleaning up cottonwood limbs and leaves every time the wind blows, and the millions of leaves we have to clean up in the fall, the ash trees in particular require a ton of trimming.

Green and White Ash seem to have been the planting of choice back in the 70s and especially into the 80s and early 90s as the elms all started dying from dutch elm disease.  While the ash is a relatively quick grower, not too messy and has fairly dense wood, it is a really droopy grower and tends to lose its "tree shape" over a number of years and starts to look like a weird blob.

Hence, the weapon of choice for us against the ash trees is the polesaw.  It is a relatively slow and and laborious process cutting off all the low hanging branches and hauling them away, but the results have been well worth it.  Trimming the limbs up has shown a lot of benefits:

• much easier for the staff mowing rough, not getting branches in the face all the time
• increased turf health by allowing more sunlight penetration
• a better line of sight through the rough areas
• easier to play from underneath of, by not hitting branches in your backswing
• a more shapely and beautiful tree that actual looks taller once it is limbed up off the ground

We have thus far been able to finish trimming on holes 2, 3, 6, and half of 14....which means we have a long way to go still....

The left rough on hole 2 before trimming

Everything limbed, just lots of cleanup left

The finished product on hole 2.  The view through the trees is much
more appealing now and significantly more playable!

Going to town on the ash trees behind 3 green

Andy taking off the branch hanging over the back of 1 green.

Growing Our Own Sod

Most golf courses utilize what is referred to as a "nursery", which is essentially an out of play area on the property where grass is raised for the specific purpose of one day being harvested as sod to be used elsewhere on the course.  Doing this makes sense for a variety of reasons.  The first being, buying sod from somewhere else can be expensive.  Second, it allows us to grow a stand of grass that should be identical to what is on the course, meaning it will blend in better when it needs to be utilized.  Lastly, the nursery sod is available at a moment's notice, meaning that when we really need to lay some sod quick, we'll always have some on property to use!

Last fall we threw together a quick nursery area in the corner of the property behind 13 tee.  There were already a few extra irrigation heads over there, so it was a logical starting place (I'm fairly sure there used to be a turf nursery there a number of years ago actually.)  We mowed down some of the rough and overseeded with some bluegrass in order to form a stand of turf for fairway sod, and then in the middle of it we piled up some old aeration cores from the greens, leveled them off, and seeded some bentgrass into it.  We didn't put a whole lot of effort into it, but come this spring it was barely established enough that we could harvest whatever was in decent shape to finish the new red tee boxes on 1 and 10.

However, I made the decision this summer to expand on what we had.  I have realized that there will rarely ever be such a thing as "perfect" winter in North Dakota that will allow all of our turf on the course that is infested with Poa Annua to survive.  The collar damage we have sustained the last 2 springs is evidence of that.  It only makes sense to have plenty of sod on hand to fix as much damage as possible in the spring.

We rebuilt our nursery this week, and in doing so doubled it's size from about 1,500 sq. ft. to over 3,000 sq. ft. (next year we will rebuild even bigger!)  We just finished grading it out and seeding it today to a newer variety of bentgrass called Alpha (the same kind we used on our new tees this spring.)  This new Alpha bentgrass has shown that to be a very tight and aggressive bentgrass that should be able to outcompete the Poa Annua on the greens and collars much better than the 50 year old Penncross bentgrass that is out there now.

Tilling up the remainder of the old bentgrass nursery

After tilling, we added another 20 tons of sand to the area in
order to enlarge it to 3,000 square feet.

After final grading, we seeded 2 directions with the Alpha bentgrass, put
down a bit of fertilizer, a quick wheel packing, and then just add water!
  This time of year we should see germination in 5 or 6 days.

We are going to push the nursery pretty hard the remainder of this summer and fall in order to get the turf established enough that it will be able to be harvested first thing next spring.  All of the areas where the collars continue to die over the winter (most likely around the bottom edges of the greens where ice accumulates) we will immediately sod out first thing in the spring and get it over with.  The benefit of this will be two-fold.  For starters, we will not have to look at dead turf all spring while we try to reseed the areas and wait for it to recover.  Secondly, and more importantly, we will be replacing the heavy Poa Annua infested areas with a stand of pure bentgrass.  This means that instead of simply recovering from the problem, we will be fixing the problem!  As was evidenced last winter, the bentgrass can actually survive the conditions of a winter here, the Poa Annua cannot and will always continue to die.  We sod the dead collars out once with bentgrass and they should never die in the spring again.....

I think I have posted this picture a few times so far this year.  If there was
ever an argument for sodding bentgrass into the collars, this spot on 17
that we patched out last summer pretty well sums it up.
Poa = Dead     Bentgrass = Alive and Well

Joining The 21st Century

It has taken me close to 2 years since I have been at GFCC, but I have finally put together an updated and accurate irrigation map!

The current system we have was installed in either 1985 or 1986.  The map that I was left with when I got here is a colored pencil drawing on a blank piece of paper and is dated 9/18/1985.  It wasn't even an accurate map, I believe it was the original layout they used to install the system from, but of course what ended up going in the ground turned out to be quite a bit different from what was put on paper.

I have spent countless hours here with a wire tracer and a metal detector looking for grown over/flooded and silted over irrigation valves.  It is imperative to have a location for each of these, as there are often times when a zone valve will stick on and not turn off electronically, and it must be closed manually.  For the first year I was here, I would go to turn off an irrigation valve that was stuck on and it would take me hours to actually find it and turn it off.  Having this updated map will allow everyone on the staff now to know exactly where all the components of the irrigation system are located so they can be found and accessed at a moments notice.

While this new map is a dramatic upgrade, it still isn't quite up to industry standards.  Any new irrigation as-builts completed in the last 10 years are now all shot with GPS points and laid out in a CAD file.  That wasn't exactly an option here, but at least now the map is overlayed onto an updated aerial image and is saved in an editable computer file for future updates.

The 1985 pencil drawing that I was left with when I got here.  I almost fell out of my chair when I first saw this antique!

The new map is overlayed onto an aerial image taken last summer.  I have all the points saved in an editable Photoshop file so that it can be easily updated as we add, move, or remove any components.

Summer Flood Reseeding

Our summer flood went down just about as quick as it had come up, leaving behind another path of destruction, albeit pretty minor this time.  We ended up losing some rough on the left side of 9 and 17, and the right side of 15 and 18.  All the areas were really of no concern because since I have been here in the last 2 years we have never really had any grass down there anyway!

The really difficult part about getting some grass to grow in those areas is that we don't have any irrigation that hits them, except for the left side of 9.  While all of those areas have been seeded before, all that has ever really come up in them is a stand of knotweed, plantains, and some dandelions.  Our best chance of getting some good turf down there was when we reseeded them in the spring of 2012, but it turned out to be such a dry spring that nothing really took well enough, and the knotweed choked out whatever came up anyway.

This spring, after our first flood went down, we spent most of May spraying all the weeds that popped up in those rough areas in anticipation of being able to seed them as soon as the ground was dry enough.  However, most of May and June turned out to be entirely too wet to put a seeder down in them anyway.

With the hot and dry weather this week, those areas just now became dry enough to get our seeder in there.  We put down an incredibly heavy rate of perennial ryegrass, which is without a doubt the fastest germinating and establishing seed we can use.  Unfortunately, perennial ryegrass most likely won't survive our winters here very well, but in all honestly most of those areas will die in another flood again in the near future anyway.  It would just be really nice to have some grass down in those rough areas for the rest of this year.

Andy seeding the right rough on 18

Amazingly, in one of my many treasure hunting efforts with a wire
tracer and metal detector, I found an old quick coupler buried on the
mainline on 17, so we have been running a hose and sprinkler down
in the left rough on 17.

The left rough on 9 has two heads that irrigate it, it also though just
took a really long time to find the buried valve for it.

Also, with the river back in its bank, we were able to get the river pump back out.  It was still a little higher than we usually put it out at, but running the pumps on 14 gets old fast, so we sent it back out!  We had some small mechanical issues to work through with the pump once it was out, but with our nifty new floating dock it is as easy as walking out to the pump, pulling it out, and fixing right there on the spot.

River pump repair has been exponentially easier this year
with the floating dock.

More Sand

For a variety of reasons, our greens have a tendency to get puffy and soft as soon as the weather starts to get hot and humid.  It is caused by a combination of factors including lack of subsurface drainage as well as excess organic matter in the rootzone.  Also, the bentgrass on our greens was originally seeded to a variety called 'Penncross', which was one of the very first turfgrasses ever to be genetically bred back in 1955.  While it is still regarded as a decent bentgrass cultivar, it isn't the greatest.  Part of its issue is that it has a tendency to separate into genetic clones of its self over time, leading to a very distinctly mottled appearance.  Apparently, some of these clones have the tendency to get softer than others, which leads to small scalped patches on the greens as we get down to our summer mowing height of .125"

Genetic separation of Penncross is very evident in the spring as all the
different clones green up at different rates.

There are really only two solutions to this problem.  The first is water management.  We have been making a very conscience effort this summer to use our new moisture meter and keep the greens as dry as possible, without letting them get too dry.  It has proven however to be a very difficult challenge to effectively manage the moisture on the greens with our outdated and inaccurate overhead sprinklers, meaning we have to rely on handwatering, a lot.  That is very difficult somedays with our small crew.

Our other weapon against soft greens is sand.  I have a love hate relationship with sand however.  I love how much it helps to firm and smooth the greens surface.  I hate how much it destroys the reels on our mowers.  Regardless, it is a necessary evil.

We topdressed the greens with another good coat of sand today, only 2 weeks after the last application.  Hopefully the greens will respond well and should pick up some firmness and speed in the coming days. 

We also tried a new method of incorporating the sand into the turf canopy this time as well.  Our Penncross/Poa Annua greens aren't very dense in comparison to newer Bentgrass stands, so instead of using a brush we used our greensroller.  Furthermore, we utilized the spiker attachment on our roller at the same time.  This helped to not only get a little bit of the sand worked down into the top of the rootzone, but also helped to open up the surface of the greens to allow better oxygen exchange with the roots, which is extremely important this time of year with the heat and humidity.

Throwing sand.  A relatively heavy application for the middle of summer.

The roller/spiker combination did a great job of pounding the
sand down into the canopy.