It's About To Get Ugly Out There....

We have had a terrible summer for weeds in the tightly mowed turf areas, mostly collars, approaches, and fairways.  Most of these were able to take hold in the spring with so much dead grass out on the course early on as a result of the dry, open winter we experienced last year. 

Most of the weeds were eventually choked out by the turf as it filled in, except for one.  Prostrate knotweed popped up early in the summer (May for the most part) but didn't really start taking over until the middle of July or so.  Unfortunately, looking back I wished we had sprayed the fairways and collars a little more extensively early in the summer than just the few small spot treatments that we did.  The knotweed has become out of control in a few areas.

We sprayed the last summer application on the fairways this week with our typical mixture of Civitas, growth regulator, and fertilizer.  In this last one however we added another product to the mix, a herbicide called Sterling Blue.  Although it has a very low use rate (4oz/acre, think spraying out half of a pop can over an entire football field) it is a rather potent and very cost effective formulation that will hopefully knock down some of the knotweed this fall and give the turf the ability to start filling those areas in before winter. 

That being said, we are about to find out exactly how much knotweed is out there.  It has already started to turn a little white and curl up a bit, and hopefully will go to yellow and then brown in the coming weeks.  When that happens, there are going to be some pretty ugly spots out in the fairways throughout the fall as the turf takes back over those areas.

Hole 9 fairway, pretty thick

The knotweed in the approaches drives me absolutely crazy.  If I had enough
time I would go out and pull it all by hand.  Definitely learned my lesson
this year, I bet next spring we nail the weeds a little earlier....

An Early Fall or Symptoms of Drought?

Anyone who has played the golf course in the last week has probably noticed how many cottonwood leaves have been dropping already.  It isn't even the beginning of September yet, and you would have a difficult time finding your ball in the rough on a few holes (4, 13, 18 for example.)  While we had some chilly mornings of 41 and 42 degrees back in the middle of August, we have not had any frosts yet, leading me to believe that the leaves dropping off the cottonwoods is not a result of the typical passage of fall weather.

Rather, I would assume that this is the result of what has been a long, hot summer.  Cottonwoods are of course a water loving tree that typically grows around rivers and creeks.  Most of the ones we have planted on the course are certainly not in any bodies of water, and are well outside of our irrigation zones.  The cottonwoods dropping their leaves early is their way of trying to survive a drought by shedding their foliage in order to conserve water for the roots. 

Cottonwood going dormant left of 3 fairway

The foliage mess has begun, only 2 more months
of blowing and mulching leaves....

Blowing fairways prior to mowing has started a little early this year
with the cottonwoods dropping their leaves so early. 

High Tech Water Management

For those of you that may have been regularly following my blog this summer, you can probably recall a couple of posts highlighting the importance of water management on the golf course.  For us, water management is the integration of two components with one basic concept.  The components involved in water management are of course the irrigation/water delivery system, and the soil in which we are irrigating.  The concept is that we don't water to over water the turfgrass, and we don't want to underwater the turfgrass.  Just the right amount is critical.

A new tool arrived on the market in the last few years that marries these concepts into hard numbers and science, compared with old-fashion guesswork and feel.  Digital moisture meters, based on the concept of time-domain reflectometery, give superintendents the ability to put a probe into the ground, push a button, and instantly get a reading of the exact volumetric percentage of water in the rootzone.  The old standby method of checking soil moisture involved pulling a plug from the ground with a profiler and looking, feeling, smelling, tasting, and listening to the soil to try and "guess" how much water was actually in it.

I purchased one of these moisture meters last week, and am still learning the intricacies of exactly how to utilize it.  Every green responds to different levels of moisture differently.  Some greens have a much deeper sand layer than others, some are composed of different types of sand, almost all of them have different amounts of organic matter in that sand, and the turfgrass root structure capable of utilizing the water is different on almost every green.  While one water volume might be healthy on one green, on another green that same number might mean turf that is already way past the wilt point. 

The main goal with this instrument is to take the guess work out of determining how much moisture is in the rootzone.  We can pinpoint an exact mositure level a green is at, and determine if it might need only handwatered in a few spots, the overheads run on the entire thing, or if it has adequate moisture everywhere and doesn't need any water at all.  This will be especially helpful during the hot and humid period in the summer when we need to keep the greens moist, but not too wet to avoid suffocating the grass and increasing our disease potential.

Another area the moisture meter will be helpful with is producing uniform and consistent moisture levels across each individual green.  As everyone is probably aware, our irrigation system is horribly outdated, which means:  heads are improperly spaced, piping is too small, pressure is too low, and any sort of detailed control is impossible based on the 30 year old wiring.  What this leads to is greens that lack any sort of uniform moisture distribution.  The three following examples are all taken off of the same green, number 5:

From the back right of 5 green, with only 9% moisture this area was already showing slight signs of drought stress.
Also, this portion of the green is so firm that I think if you landed a PW here your ball would probably bounce
like it had just landed on a concrete cartpath.

From the front left of 5 green, 17.4% moisture seems to be a pretty comfortable moisture level for us.  This area of
the green will receive balls well, but should still provide a firm and smooth surface to putt on.

From the very middle of 5 green.  This area is where all the water from the irrigation heads on the perimeter of the green
land because they don't have enough pressure to throw back out to the perimeter on the other side.  At 30% moisture,
this area of the green is like a sponge, if you landed a PW here the ball might plug in its own ballmark. 

With such an outdated and inaccurate irrigation system, the only way to try and get any sort of uniformity in the moisture in the greens is by handwatering the dry areas with a hose, and allowing the remainder of the green to dry out.  You might notice in all of the above pictures, I took a soil profile with an old probe from each area to show how difficult it would be to determine with any accuracy how much moisture was there.  This meter gives us specific numbers in order to know in advance how to plan our watering of each individual green.

Red vs. Green

Probably one of the biggest questions in the turf industry these days, if you ask any superintendent, is what color they like their turf equipment.  Toro and John Deere are the two big players in the market, and everyone has their preference.  Both manufacturers make a quality piece of equipment.  Our fleet at this point is almost entirely Toro, with a small splattering of orange (Jacobsen) thrown in just to make things interesting.  While I have nothing against either one of these manufacturers, the fact of the matter is that some of our equipment is 10-15 years old and is just plain tired. 

We do not have a full-time mechanic on staff, and with nearly half a million dollars of equipment parked in our equipment bay, it needs to be taken care of by someone.  Between Andy and myself we had an extremely busy winter getting everything in tip top shape for this summer.  However, with some of our equipment that is just too old, we still end up putting the proverbial duct tape and zip ties all over them during the course of the growing season just to keep them going.  There are a few mowers in our shop that spend almost as much time either getting worked on or sitting around broken as they do actually working out on the course.  We are short staffed as it is in the summer months, and when Andy or I have to spend time in the shop working on equipment, it just means there is one more thing we are neglecting out on the course. 

Our oldest mowers, two Toro 325 rough mowers, were built in 2000 and have close to 4,800 operating hours on them.  To put that into perspective, imagine in your car averaged a speed of 50 mph over its lifetime of stop and go traffic and interstate cruising.  If you drove it for 4,800 operating hours your car would have 240,000 mile on it!  Needless to say, at some point it doesn't make sense to keep fixing it, its just time for a new car.

Last week, our friendly John Deere dealer out of SD brought us up a new 7500 fairway mower to demo for a couple days.  Our current fairway mowers are 2007's and have a little over 2,000 hours on them, and while they are still running strong, they are entering the point in their lifespan where major repairs are right around the corner.  For example, after one more winter of grinding and sharpening the reels and bedknives, they will literally be out of any steel left to cut with.  Replacement of reels, bedknives, and bearings for the 10 cutting units on our two fairway mowers is going to cost a quick $5,000 next winter, just to keep them cutting grass.  And those are only the forseeable costs....

Seeing the side by side cutting comparison of our 6 year old fairway mowers to a new unit was an amazing thing to see.  Our old fairway mowers have hydraulically driven reel motors.  Some of you may have seen the consequences, especially last year, when a 6 year old hydraulic hose just decides to crack and break one day:  lots of dead grass.  These new fairway mowers have reels driven by electric motors, meaning no hydraulic oil, meaning no potential for leaks.  Furthermore, these electric driven reels run faster and quieter.  The new John Deere fairway mower cut faster, more precise, quieter, and when all was said and done used about 25% less fuel.



Side by side comparison in 17 fairway. 



Green just looks better on a golf course....

A Reversal Of Fortunes

After my blog post on July 22nd, Into The Fire, reported how my dire predictions for a hot and dry summer were coming to fruition, it was as if mother nature was out to prove me wrong.  In the last 2 weeks, the weather has made a dramatic reversal back to "average", which after weeks straight of furnace-like temperatures, feels pretty darn nice. 

Truth be told, July turned out to be the hottest month ever recorded in Grand Forks with an average temperture of 6.2 degrees above normal.  However, we were much more fortunate than the remainder of the midwest and managed to sneak out above average precipitation for the month.  The 3.35" of rain that fell in July was only .20" above average, and while the majority of that rain fell at the end of the month when we received almost 2" overnight on the 25th, we were happy just to get anything at that point. 

Now however it appears that August is going to make up for the junk weather that July gave us.  In the last week of July and this first week and a half of August we have received over 3.5" of rain and have had temperatures near and even below normal.  By the third week of July some of the rough areas on the course that are outside of the irrigation could have gone up in flames if you had dropped a match on them.  Now, two and half weeks later, most of those areas have almost completely recovered and are green and growing again. 

Even better, the greens to seem to have recovered pretty well, except for 3, 6, and 10 which suffered enough damage in the heat that they probably won't completely recover until later this fall.  Cool season grasses thrive in daytime highs around 75 degrees, and especially love the cool nights when the temperatures dip down into the 50s.  We have had plenty of those days in the last two weeks.  If the grass had a face, it would likely have a smile from ear to ear right now.

Also, we are to the point in the season where our growth regulators are much more effective, and with our new roller we are able to finally get the speeds going pretty well on the greens.  While I rarely use the dreaded stimpmeter, I had to get it out this week just to see where we were at.  After a single cut and roll on Thursday morning, 16 green gave me some pretty reliable numbers at 11' 9" (US Open green speeds are probably around 12' -13' just for comparison).....which in all honesty is too fast for our 50 year old greens.  While some of you scratch golfers may like those screaming speeds, we don't have enough decent pin placements on our greens to support those speeds on a regular basis.  I would say somewhere around 10' is a better daily number for us, but it sure is fun every once and awhile to get a little carried away....

Well, it seems like for the last month or so I have had nothing but bad pictures of stressed out grass and flooded bunkers to put on the blog, so now that the weather is nice, and both the grass and I can take it a little easier, here are some nice pictures to give everyone a warm fuzzy feeling again.....

Hole 18 at sun up

Hole 9 looking nice, especially with the creek banks filled
in with vegetation this year

I had to throw in this picture of Allie out playing in the wildflowers
while we were out for a course tour one evening.  I have to admit that
they have been an amazing success this summer, we will definitely be
planting a lot more next spring!

Feast Or Famine

Like most things in life, it seems that rarely events ever happen in moderation.  After a solid two weeks without rain on the golf course and temperatures consistently in the upper 80's and 90's, the course was getting pretty baked.  And then last night, as if nature was trying to play catch up, it rained 1.50" in what must have been only 30 minutes or so.

In an ideal world, the skies would release about .30" to .40" of rain every 4 days.  Just enough to saturate the ground, then give things a few days to dry out and firm up a bit.  Of course that never happens, but I can always be hopeful.  1.50" of rain every 14 days isn't exactly how we like to "irrigate", but beggers can't be choosers.  While the moisture was certainly very welcome, that much rain when it comes that fast doesn't saturate into our heavy silty clay soils in the Red River Valley very quickly, meaning quite a bit of that runs off and puddles. 

Of the 45 bunkers on the course, 38 of them looked like this.



Fortunately we have plenty of pumps.



It is going to be a few days before we can get all the bunkers put
back together and cleaned up.

 

The wind must not have been too bad with the storm, but enough to
warrant blowing off some fairways and greens before they were mowed.



Just lots of leaves and small branches down this time, almost....



While the 100 or so massive old cottonwoods managed to escape any

serious damage, amazingly we lost only this one tiny little evergreen

tree that broke in half....?



I am usually not surprised by what I find on the course after a storm, but
the exploded propane tank that was in the middle of the driving range
tee was a little bit of an odd find.



Into The Fire

We officially just hit our highest temp of the summer today, with the thermometer hitting 97 degrees, a full 15 degrees above our average high for today of 82.  With the way the temperatures have been in the last month, the turfgrass on the course has been thrown into the fire. 

For those of you who may regularly keep up with my blog, you may remember my predictions back in March after we had experienced an extremely dry and warm winter, and then the temperature soared to 30 degrees above average by the middle part of that month, that we were in for a hot and dry summer.  I don't claim to be Nostradamus, but things definitely look to be shaping up that way.  For just a quick comparison, up to this point in the summer we have already recorded 10 days of 90 degrees or greater, and we still have a week and a half left in July and all of August and September still to go.  In 2011 we recorded only 8 days the entire summer over 90 degrees, 10 days in 2010, and only 4 days in 2009.  The summer of 2012 will likely go down as one of the hotter and drier ones on record.   

While the hot temperatures are certainly an issue for the grass, there are a multitude of different factors that lead to turfgrass decline during the summer months, including:

• Hot daytime temperatures will literally cook grass.  Surface temperatures on a green during a sunny afternoon in the 90s without much wind can easily reach 105 to 110 degrees.
• Warm night time temperatures give the turf less cool down time and lead it to use up its carbohydrate reserves stored in roots faster than it can make new carbohydrates through photosynthesis during the day.  This leaves the plant with an energy deficit, using up more energy than it can create, and slowly causing the roots to die off
• Watering becomes a huge concern, most people don't realize that overwatering can kill the turf just as fast as an underwatered plant.  Especially on greens, water logged soils heat up faster and hold less oxygen, and will literally smother and kill the roots, which is even more exaggerated on humid days with little wind and warm nights that don't cool off the soils.  When you are standing on a green in the middle of the afternoon, sweating, and feeling like you can barely breathe because it is humid and there isn't any wind, the green you are standing on is literally suffocating.
• Disease pressure starts to skyrocket.  Hot and humid conditions turn the soils and turf on the golf course into a petri dish for fungal growth.  Another reason to watch how much we water, as wet and overly saturdated soils will grow turfgrass pathogens much more rapidly than in dry conditions.
• Mechanical stresses from our equipment makes matters worse.  With the NDGA match play this week we double cut the greens for 3 straight days and had the roller our for 5 straight days.  We are our own worst enemy by giving the turf the proverbial "kick when it is already down" by trying to keep playing conditions at their peak in this stressful time.

Double cutting greens on Wednesday

Fast and firm with the new roller



Textbook summer stress, especially on the collars from all the extra
compaction and abuse from where all the mowers and rollers
come on and off the green.


Now that we are starting to see some effects of a rough summer, there are some helpful actions we can take:

• Starting this coming week we will be raising mowing heights a little on the greens and collars and approaches.  A little extra leaf tissue goes a long way toward to plant health this time of year.
• Also, we will be mowing a little less often.  Cutting the grass plant in half everyday is a huge stress that requires the plant to use a lot of extra energy just to heal the wound.
• Hand watering becomes even more important.  Fortunately, we took the time this spring to add the extra quick couplers by the greens.  Delivering water only where it is needed on the greens allows the dry spots to get enough water, which the over head irrigation sometimes can't do, as well as allow the wet areas that don't need any extra water to dry out a little bit.
• Continuing to spray small amounts of foliar fertilizer and pesticides on a regular basis.  When the grass plant is stressed, they are much more suscpetible to being damaged by diseases.  Pesticides allow us to almost entirely eliminate that part of the equation.  Furthermore, small amounts of foliar fertilizer are quickly absorbed into the plant and give it a rapid boost of Nitrogen on a weekly basis to keep the plant photosynthesizing and producing carbohydrates.

Hand watering allows us to perfectly water the dry spots on the greens,
while keeping the rest of the green from being overwatered.

While the greens and collars have taken a bit of a hit recently, the fairways seem to be holding up quite well.  The main difference with the fairways is that their biggest threat is from a disease called Pythium, which our sand based greens aren't really threatened by.  Pythium grows in intensely hot and humid weather and wet soils.  While we have had the hot and humid conditiions this summer, we haven't had any massive rains from a thunderstorm that have left the course overly wet like we had frequently last summer.

Textbook pythium growing in 6 fairway in July of 2011

Pythium damage in 11 fairway in July of 2011

Looking down 11 fairway and Pythium damage in July 2011



11 fairway this July, hanging in there a little better

While I sure certainly love my job taking care of the course, the hot months of summer tend to raise my blood pressure a little bit.  Coupled with an alarm clock that goes off at 4:00am for 6 or 7 days a week, and hopefully you get an idea why I start really looking forward to those cool fall mornings this time of year...