This summer has been all about water management. It is as much about keep water off as it is about putting it on. Home lawns are not susceptible to overwatering, so constantly letting the irrigation fly is a no brainer. Letting the irrigation fly indiscriminately on greens, tees, and fairways can lead to death. Roots are susceptible to death in saturated soils. We would rather have turf go dormant because of dryness (wilting) than to have it melt away due to too much water. The dormant turf will come back, the turf that has melted away is just dead.
The picture below is of one of our assistants, Joe Diorio, checking soil moisture with a meter. We have found that keeping soil moisture under 20% and over 11% is pretty much the sweet spot. Joe will go over every green in a grid pattern. The green will either be watered with sprinklers or the dry spots indicated by the meter will be watered by hose. This has allowed us to provide some pretty firm and fast greens in a year where greens are inclined to be soft and sticky due to humidity.
Below is Fernando watering rough on two. The rough is inclined to burn out during the summer, it requires more water than the fairways do. But the irrigation system is in the fairways, so the fairways would have to be over watered to give the rough adequate water. This is why you will see a lot of guys out with hoses watering the rough along greens and fairways. Not many people play from tee banks, so we do not supplement there.
Something else has been going on this summer you may not know about…our new fairway topdressing program (picture below). We are going out at very light rates so that the golfers do not notice the sand for any more than a day. Rather than do it twice a year heavily, we are out there 1x to 2x a month lightly. We have also added verticutting to our fairway care and this has stood the turf up much better than in the past.
Finally, the last thing you may not have noticed is that the ponds are much cleaner than in summers past. We have applied to the Dedham and Westwood Conservation Commissions to treat the ponds for weeds and algae. Despite what this may look like, this is a good environmental practice. Milfoil has been identified in our ponds…it is extremely invasive and will choke out everything…a treatment program is very welcomed in this instance. While the ponds are not perfect yet, they are certainly much better.
The weather of the past few weeks has turned this into a very difficult season. It may have qualified as a difficult season with just the floods in the spring, but the heat wave has removed all doubt. By all accounts the last time we had a summer like this it was 1988. In general I am pleased at how most of the course is handling the diversity of this season from winter kill, to flooding, to drought, to the this heat and humidity. The tough turf we have trained is using less water and staying in better shape except where we got hit with nematodes (which are unpredictable).
Over the weekend, soil temperatures on greens reached the mid 90’s at two inches deep. This is astonishing…root die back of bentgrass starts in the mid to high 80’s. This is why we try to grow roots as deep as we can earlier in the season…because with soil temps like this the roots stop functioning and start shrinking. The dysfunction can get even worse in instance where the soil has plenty of moisture, but the turf is still wilting.
While the damage we have on the greens (5,8,14, and 17) is from nematodes, it is this heat that is preventing recovery. That is an important nuance. Nematode damage just a few weeks earlier on 6 and 11 were treated and recovery was outstanding, but that was before recovery inhibiting weather hit. We need soil temperature to get back down into the lower 80’s and upper 70’s before meaningful recovery can occur.
We have a game plan for these greens that includes tree work to improve circulation and if that is not successful we will install fans. In addition, the areas hit hardest on those greens have poorer soils making root growth difficult so we will up our efforts to modify these area with sand and aeration. These steps will help us avoid these issues in the future.
The good news is that the decline has been stopped and now we are just waiting for the weather to allow us to seed and get some recovery.
This time of year, as you drive around you will see the most beautiful expanses of purple flowers in wetland that previously may have looked just plain ugly. What you see is called purple loosestrife and it is an invasive weed. It has no native natural predators and each mature plant can produce several million seeds… so it takes over whole eco systems.
Recently, research has shown that there is a beetle from Europe that devours this plant and we have instituted that program here.
The above picture shows the delivery of 10 plants with the beetles. Below, you can see that we place the containers with the beetles out on the course in areas where we have had a history of loosestrife.
This final picture is one of our plants being devoured. It may take a couple of years, but we will soon have our very diverse habitat back. The DCPC is a wonderful property and G&G is doing its best to keep invasive weeds at bay to keep it that way.
Thanks to DCPC member Susan Hunt for facilitating this program.
The blog has been dark the past few days as we upgrade our technology…not because we need new tech, it is just that our old tech stopped functioning.
The latest USGA update paints a pretty accurate picture of not only what is going on in the region, but here at Dedham. The poa is fairly disease ridden and has been a challenge to keep clean. The good news for DCPC is that our fairways are pretty much poa free, and the amount of poa in our greens has been severely reduced insulating us from the worst of this. Most of our battles with disease are on the newer weaker poas that are predominately around the outside edges of the greens…mostly where the old collars used to be before the green expansions.
Poa is almost always the turf with issues on a golf course…it is the most susceptible to disease, drought, and nematodes. It is a worthy goal to work to rid the course of the weed.
The other thing we do here that is mentioned in the article is manage water like it is gold. When you get warm weather and saturated soils (as we had last year), roots start to get diseased and/or cook.
Click below for the article.
USGA Northeast Update
If you were to drive through the fairway on 18 you might notice an old metal cover in the ground. What you might not expect is a six foot deep rock lined well with an exceptional amount of water constantly moving trough it. It turns out that this use to feed the old clubhouse well (the cement structure that used to be on the left of the hole). It also use to feed the fountain that is at the beginning of the hole. Because of health regulations, that fountain is no longer operational.
The plywood cover that was at the beginning of the fairway pulls up to reveal the full cement basin above. This set up allowed the water level to be very close to the surface of the fairway.
We removed the cement basin a found a myriad of pipes that must’ve fed a myriad of things from this spring. I believe this whole spring/well system was something that predates the course.
The finished product above…a little nice than the plywood. It will be a little more interesting as well as you will be able to walk by it and pear in and marvel at the amount of water that runs just a few inches below your feet on many places on this course.
