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Golf Course Update

The heat has been the story lately. It seems that we are in the midst of another heat wave with 35C + temps with high humidity. As mentioned before these temps' limit the amount of abuse our greens can withstand. We are typically topdressing, verticutting, double cutting and rolling greens to maintain speed, but with this type of environmental pressure we do reduce these practices for the sake of the health of our turfgrass. One of the issues in this type of weather is the fact that the night time lows are not so low. We have been averaging about 20C overnight. The turfgrass plant continues to grow and metabolize throughout the night. This exerts an abnormal amount of energy and to put it frankly the plant gets tired. The poa in our greens starts to look a little weak and stressed. We are on a fertility program that is light and frequent, that aids in the strength and vitality of the plant. This can only do so much, at some point the plant needs a breather. We were fortunate to receive a little shot of rain early in the week. That rain helped recover some of the drought stressed areas (fairways and rough) from the hot/dry previous couple of weeks. As mentioned in the previous post we will continue to be out on the golf course with hoses both watering (when need be) and syringing (cooling off) greens. We do not water with a blanket program on our golf course. We make decisions daily on the needs of each specific turfgrass area. We look at the need for overnight water, hand watering, syringing and the amount of water to apply. We manage water this way to maintain good fast and firm conditions, to maintain plant health and practice the responsible and efficient use of water.
With these high temperatures often comes thunderstorms. This can be very detrimental to our turfgrass (depending on the amount of rain recieved). With the heat continuing to be so high, saturated soils with high soil temperatures can lead to disease issues and root die back. This is one of the reasons that we tend to manage the golf course on the dry side.
On another note, we have been rather busy on the golf course with non-water related tasks as well...
Some of the tasks performed lately are:
-removal of some dead/dying trees
-stump grinding
-bunker sand shifting and smoothing
-course detailing (edging, weed eating, garden maintenance)
-rough fertilization
-early morning broad leaf weed control
-tree trimming
-fairway divoting

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