This is a common question these days here at HCC. Every spring our Poa greens go to seed (notice the yellowish grass in the picture). This is a natural part of Poa's life cycle. If you play late in the day, it will be worse, much worse. The plants go to flower with the sunshine and become big and bushy. This creates a very slow and rather bunpy putting surface. We apply a growth regulator to help regulate the growth throughout the day. Currently (today) we are near the tail end of the last application. We were scheduled to apply this morning, but rain and very windy conditions prevented us from doing so. We will attempt to go with the sprayer on Wednesday morning. You will notice some of the Grounds Dept. staff out on the greens performing a number of practices to combat the seed head production (verticutting, brushing, double cutting and possibly afternoon mowing).
A week has passed since our annual spring greens aeration. We have had a mixed bag of weather, hot, dry, cold, wet and even frost! These conditions make it challenging to aid in healing, but with the more recent consistent warm temperatures we are seeing solid recovery. We were fortunate to have decent weather to complete the process on time, allowing us to fill all the holes created by the 1/2” hollow tines. As there are some minor depressions within some of the holes we will be beginning our bi-weekly topdressing program early next week. Our team is mowing and rolling our greens daily, while slowly lowering our height of cut to our summer norm. We all know that spring cultural practices are not popular among golfers, but these all important tasks are the building blocks for high performance greens conditions throughout the heart of the golf season. Check out this video produced by the USGA on Aerations effect on putting...
Comments
Post a Comment