It is amazing how quickly Mother Nature can change our plans in the golf course maintenance business. On Friday, we were close to wrapping up our bunker sand reconstruction project and I was planning to write up a post about that effort over the weekend. Then we had an F2 tornado rip down the middle of Main Street on Saturday night and wreak havoc on our golf course.
We suffered significant tree loss and damage, mostly along the areas closest to Main Street. Five of the big pines along hole 5 fell across Main Street and took out the utility lines. The driving range net was mangled. We lost a lot of the trees lining the main entrance. We’ve had multiple contracted tree services working alongside our regular maintenance team to clean up the course and get it back into service as quickly as possible.
I’ll provide a more thorough recap when we get things back to normal, but wanted to share a quick video of the damage.
We appreciate your many offers to help and your patience during this tough time. I am thankful for the tireless efforts of the first responders, the many utility and infrastructure workers that have been going around the clock, our tree service partners, our regular maintenance team members and other staff at the club, and the patience of the members of Bluegrass.
At the end of the day, we understand that we only suffered damage to a golf course. There are so many more in our community whose lives were changed so much more significantly Saturday night at 4:57 PM. Our thoughts and prayers continue to be with them.
We appreciate you allowing us uninterrupted access to the golf course for a few extra days in the middle of the summer. It’s been all hands on deck for the agronomy staff as we are actively performing three separate turf venting processes: dryjecting the greens and aerating and verticutting the fairways and tees.
Our roller coaster weather of hot, dry weeks relieved with heavy rain, followed by hot, humid conditions can leave the turf roots unable to absorb water fast enough. When this happens, the entire plant suffers and it can be lethal. These conditions can also lead to the onset of problematic pests.
One way to combat these issues is through venting. Venting makes lots of small holes that break the surface and create channels for gas exchange. This is beneficial because it helps dry out the upper profile where the roots are most active and dense.
You are very familiar with the less-than-popular, but necessary, periodic aerations we perform on the greens several times each year. And in the fall, we have historically had good results from aerating the fescue rough. But we’ve never taken the step of venting all of our fairway turf. This summer you have seen us sodding larger than usual areas in the fairways due to last winter’s extreme flash freeze. We have tried to help other struggling fairway areas recover with targeted local aeration. But it is time we take the extra step and vent all of the fairways and tees.
Click to view a sample of this week’s activities in the video below.
The DryJect process uses a high-speed, water-based injection system to blast aeration holes through the root zone to fracture the soil. The patented vacuum technology simultaneously fills holes to the surface with high volumes of sand or amendment.
Using DryJect, we can relieve compaction, increase water infiltration, reach the root zone with oxygen and amend the soil with high volumes of material all at the same time. Plus the DryJect one-step service leaves the surface free of plugs; it’s clean, smooth, and ready to play. If you noticed in the video, this process requires a lot of manual labor and sand movement. The agronomy team did a great job to complete all the greens in record time on Monday.
Aerating and Verticutting Fairways and Tees
This is the first time in memory that we have attempted a surface venting project on the scale of all fairways and tees. We used both our Toro ProCore tow-behind and walk-behind units to perform what you typically think of as aeration – removing small soil cores from the turf. The resulting holes allow excess moisture to evaporate and promote gas exchange in the soil, resulting in stronger root systems and turf that is better able to tolerate golfer traffic. We followed that with a separate tow-behind Verticut unit using vertical blades to remove thatch (old plant material) buildup. Think of it as vertical mowing. Getting rid of thatch helps the turf to breathe easier and better absorb nutrients.
Obviously all of this punching and cutting leaves a lot of material behind that needs to be cleared away. This extensive task was disrupted by Wednesday’s rain, so please be patient over the next few days as we work to get everything wrapped up.
We will begin to see the benefits of these efforts over the coming weeks and our Bermuda should hold strong to the finish line of its growing season in October. More importantly, our turf will be in a strengthened position entering dormancy and better equipped to handle winter.
Even though we are still waiting for consistently warmer temps, these photos show that we are seeing significant fairway green-up over the last 3 weeks. Hole #9 is in the upper 3 photos and the approach to hole #12 is in the bottom 2.
“It was 80 degrees the other day, why aren’t we green yet?”
The short answer: it’s all about the temperature. The effects of cold winter temperatures, along with ongoing colder night temperatures, are delaying our spring green-up. Although we’ve had warmer afternoons recently, our nighttime temperatures have fluctuated in the 40’s for the past week. We continue to evaluate golf course conditions and address areas that are concerning or are unobtainable. Diving deeper, below I’ll explain how actual data is used to compare Potential Growth vs. Temperature.
What about Temperatures? The optimum average growing temperature for cool season grasses is 67.5 degrees. For warm season grasses, it’s much higher at 87.5 degrees. Growth Potential (GP) is a way to put a numerical value on the ability of the turf to grow. GP was developed by Pace Turf to describe the relationship between turfgrass growth and temperature.
We can look at last week’s data to compare the temperature to the potential for turf growth. The average temperature last week was 58.8 degrees. For our warm season grasses – fairways, tees and bermuda rough – that was 28.7 degrees below the optimum growing temperature of 87.5 degrees. For our cool season grasses – fescue rough and bent grass greens – that was only 8.7 degrees away from optimum growing temps.
The Growth Potential (%) for the week of April 3-9 was calculated at 5.8% for warm season turf and 65.5% for cool season turf. Data for the individual days is shown below:
Day
Date
Avg. Temp.
GP% Warm
GP% Cool
Mon.
4/3
58.1
4.5%
61.3%
Tue.
4/4
72.1
41.6%
91.9%
Wed.
4/5
72.5
43.4%
90.4%
Thu.
4/6
55.6
2.6%
46.4%
Fri.
4/7
46.8
0.3%
50.7%
Sat.
4/8
50.7
0.8%
22.4%
Sun.
4/9
55.4
2.5%
45.2%
Data compiled with assistance from Joe Galbreath, Regal Chemicals.
With almost perfect conditions leading up to Thursday for cool season grass (fescue rough), and with rain events on 4/6 of 2.5”, you might have thought that you were playing U.S. Open roughs throughout the weekend. On the flip side, we never crossed 44% Growth Potential for warm season grass, our tees and fairways. Hopefully this data will help provide a better understanding of the reasons behind the delay of spring green-up on our Bermuda grass.
Posted below is further reference data on Growth Potentials provided by Paceturf.org. If you have any questions feel free to email me at Tyler.Ingram@invitedclubs.com.
The official calendar date for spring has passed us by and Easter is right around the corner. The golf course is beginning to wake up and we are patiently waiting on soil temperatures to increase so that our Bermuda grass will begin to break dormancy.
You may have noticed around your house or in your neighborhood lots of plants, particularly hollies and laurels, were hit hard by subzero temps around the first of the year. Bermuda grass, a warm season grass, can be affected the same way. Shaded, heavily trafficked, or compacted areas can be more susceptible to damage or delayed green-up than those that are not. Our agronomic practices are constantly adjusted for these conditions based on the current weather. If we have received rainfall the previous day or days that could negatively affect the golf course in the long term, we may reduce the amount of maintenance done to greens, fescue and fairways. Our goal is to protect YOUR investment while providing the best playing surface possible under the given conditions.
We are being proactive with our cultivation methods to encourage green-up, recovery and replacement as needed. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
We have been busy preparing for the upcoming season with several projects to make your golf experience better, including:
Construction of two new tees on hole #7 for the gold and green tees. This will allow us to reduce traffic on the existing primary tee, yielding better overall conditions.
Continuing to plant 27 new trees around the course, replacing trees damaged from storms or dead and hazardous trees.
We will be transplanting four 30-foot maple trees to shape holes when weather permits.
Added 25 new additional bunker rakes.
Adding curbing and new asphalt on holes #10 and #11.
Continuing to expand our perennial and annual flower beds around the course to add more seasonal color.
Our project list will continue to grow as warmer weather approaches. If you have any questions or comments, please contact me at Tyler.Ingram@invitedclubs.com.
Next Friday, April 7th, from 10 am to 2 pm, I’ll be hosting a crawfish and shrimp boil in the Maintenance Facility. Drop by and meet your Golf Course Maintenance Staff, check out our facility and enjoy some good eats!
Looking forward to seeing you on the course, Tyler Ingram Golf Course Superintendent
The familiar saying “you can grow grass or you can grow trees, but not both” has never been more true than during the extremely dry conditions we’ve suffered this year. Our trees are a defining feature of the look and feel of Bluegrass. Many have been standing for decades. But their roots have been problematic for quite some time. When tree roots compete with turfgrass for water and nutrients, they usually win the battle.
Tree roots can actually grow out from the base of a tree a distance equal to two to three times its height. About 10% of the wood mass of trees is found underground and most of that is very small fine feeder roots that can extend into turf areas. The majority of these feeder roots will be in the upper 8 to 12 inches of the soil profile – the same root zone as the turfgrass. Incredibly, a mature oak tree can use as much as 80 gallons of water per day.
Many of our trees have grown so large that their roots are causing turf thinning in the primary rough and even out into the fairways and around the tee complexes. We tried additional irrigation and fertility actions all summer, but our best efforts could not make up for the lack of rain in June and September.
So we are trying something different during this offseason: pruning the surface roots of trees to reduce the competition for water and nutrients. We are using a new tool to cut through the close-to-surface roots, without damaging the deeper roots that keep the trees healthy. A company called Imants, headquartered in the Netherlands, introduced the root pruner that bears its name 15 years ago. Mounted behind a tractor, the Imants RootPruner cuts roots up to 4 inches in diameter to a depth of 10 inches.
As you can see in these videos, pruning the roots is a slow process, with the two blades slicing small parallel trenches that leave very little damage behind. That description does not do justice to the brute force the RootPruner expends. The crew that has been operating it say they feel like they have been in a rodeo after a pruning session!
Root pruning was performed along the tree line of this hole in NC.
We are initially pruning along the tree lines down the length of the holes. We will then target more localized areas of impact. Other courses have seen really good results from similar efforts, so it will be interesting to see how our turf looks this time next year.
Maybe someday when you pull your drive left on #13, we might actually be able to get enough grass to grow there to keep your ball from automatically rolling OB!
Although it’s not quite officially summer yet, after the last few weeks of warmer weather and greener grass it feels like the golf course is finally awake.
Thankfully we didn’t suffer sustained bitter cold over the winter, but the weather still threw us challenges. December was so warm that the fairways actually started greening up. When that happens, the dormant Bermuda can exhaust its food supplies too soon, resulting in some of the spotty areas from which we’re finally recovering. January was consistently cold and February was really wet. Thanks for your patience during the frost and weather delays that impacted over half of our days the first 10 weeks of the year.
The reduced mowing requirements during the off-season enabled your course maintenance team to focus on needed projects and improvements, including:
construction of a new and expanded chemical storage building
installation of new pedestrian bridges on holes #5 and #6
strategic tree pruning and removal to open needed channels of light and airflow, most notable around the expanded nursery greens and hole #11 tee complex
refurbishment of the on-course bathrooms
conversion of “hard-to-grow” areas to more visually appealing ground cover
equipment maintenance catch-up and prep for a new season
construction of a retaining wall and expansion of the right side tee on hole #4 – providing more area for the forward tees and an option for occasional use as the middle tee with an interesting new approach angle
addition of a new forward tee on hole #9 – 50 yards ahead of the previously most forward tee, leaving 100 yards to the crest of the hill
our latest project on and around hole #11 tee complex, including removal of two large trees to improve turf conditions, re-sodding an expanded area on the tee itself, and construction of a new pond retaining wall to greatly improve the visual appeal
Pond and bank between holes 10 and 11 before upgrades
Construction underway on hole #11 pond retaining wall
Final results of completed project
With most of these projects nearing completion and our playing surfaces rounding into form, you have probably noticed the increase in mowers on all areas of the course as we added seasonal staff in preparation for sustained warm weather. We’ll talk in another update about further actions being taken to beautify the course. Until then, know that your maintenance team is fully engaged toward providing you with the very best on-course experience.
Grounds Crew
Roger Booker
Austin Vasquez
Joe Taylor
Scott Hamby
Ben McClain
Kelly Collins
Nick Mayer
Joe Moore
Joey Coleman
Cory Edwards
Logan Galbreth
Aiden High
Carson Cochran
Bennett Mclendon
