News and Updates

In a recent Green Committee meeting a member asked me “what are we waiting for?” What he was referring to were the conditions that it is going to take to really get the grass moving. Do we need rain, heat, or is it something else?

A look at the trees, blooms, and color of the turf will show you we are much farther along this year than 2022. Below is a photo that I take every year on April 18th for my records that illustrates this.
 

2022

2023

So why do the greens and other areas of the golf course still have a tinge of brown and we still have open aerification holes? The major factors in a course breaking dormancy are soil temperatures and moisture. Soil temperatures are ten degrees warmer right now than the previous five-year average however, on the precipitation side, we are much drier at this time of year than we have been during my tenure here. It feels like the like the drought of last summer continued through the winter with the lack of snow and is now hanging around in the spring. We have supplemented water needs with our irrigation system but that is no substitute for a long, slow, soaking rain.

The grass has broken dormancy but it is still filling in. The brown you see on some surfaces are the old leaves that got beat up this past winter by wind, lack of moisture, and traffic. When the weather changes, these leaves do not turn green again. New leaves grow in from below the surface and take over. These old leaves decompose into the green surface and turn into thatch (thatch control is one of the major reasons why we aerify but that is a topic for a different article). In the photo below, you can see the new leaves emerging from the ground and covering the old reddish, brown plant tissue.
So is there anything we can do to speed this process up? Yes! This is where agronomics come into play and different superintendents make different decisions based on their own philosophies and facility expectations. We could fertilize the greens, specifically with nitrogen, to push them along but there is a trade-off that comes with that. Nitrogen is the nutrient that causes leaf tissue to grow but it also has a tendency to stick around in the soil. So we could, in theory, apply high rates of nitrogen and push the greens along slightly faster than they are progressing now. However, if we did that, there is a chance that some of that nitrogen will stay in the soil into the late spring and summer months. Excess nitrogen during the summer causes unwanted growth of greens, result in slower speeds and a softer surface. Instead, we choose to apply very small rates of nitrogen weekly through the sprayer (a technique known as spoon feeding) at rates that err on the low side.

Guests who play here during the summer regularly state how good our greens perform compared to where they normally play. One of the main factors that I attribute this to is our conservative approach to nitrogen fertility in the spring, which allows us to better control growth in the summer.

So what are we waiting for? A little rain would be nice but other than that we are in good shape. We gave the greens another small shot of food today and I anticipate them getting to in-season condition very soon.