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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The Practice Range Tee

Last fall we utilized a “new to us” method of revitilization for our practice tee. Our contractor TDS, fraize mowed the surface of the tee to remove organic matter as well at to aid in leveling. The tee was then aerified and seeded to a new variety of creeping rye grass. We chose this type of turf grass as research shows rapid recovery and a low growth habit. We were able to get some great growth in the fall, but the tee is still not ready for traffic and full use. The plan is to utilize the mats until growth has filled in some of the voids etc. We will then begin to slowly set up hitting areas on the grass tee. For a while we will alternate between grass and the mats with a 50/50 ratio of use. Once the grass tee is established and is in adequate recovery mode, the practice areas will be back to normal. As always our membership’s patience is appreciated as we try to improve these areas for use.

Spring Greens Aeration...a week later!

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...

Venting Greens...

This week we will be venting our greens with needle tines. These tines make a hole that is less than an 1/8th of inch. With our greens being completely saturated from the incredible amount of rain that we have recieved this season, there is no room for air movement in the soil. We need to create very small channels for air movement to the root zone. When roots don't have air, they die. This has not been evident yet, but with the warmer temperatures of July upon us soon, trouble could be lurking. This will be a very non-disruptive process to our members and play. We are going to vent all of our greens over then next few days early in the morning as to not disrupt play. The process is simple, we vent the green using the aerifier and needle tines, roll them smooth and then mow the green. The holes virtually dissapear and are of no effect to roll. I realize that the word aerifier starts to scare people, but this is necessary and again is very clean and non-disruptive. Check out the pic...

HIGHLAND CC GROUNDS

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