Thursday, September 27, 2012

"FROST"..........A four letter word in these parts!!

You may not want to believe it, and I’ll bet you don’t want to hear it, but we have already had one frost delay this week, and a second morning with patchy frost that didn’t require us to hold up play, but did require us to make adjustments to our morning maintenance schedule. If you haven’t heard before, when frost is on the turf the leaf blade is frozen and putting any traffic on the leaf when it is in this state breaks the cells within the leaf blade killing it. The result is dead leaf blades that turn black from damage of the foot traffic or the wheels of the vehicle that was driven across these areas. It is imperative that we don’t enter any turf area when frost is present. This is the reason we have frost delays in spring and fall.


On Tuesday of this past week we had the United States Greens Association (USGA) come in for a consultation. The agronomist toured every area of the golf course with us visiting every hole from the tee to the green. We discussed all our cultural practices such as aerification, verticutting and top dressing, fertility and fungicide programs, mowing heights and so on. We spent more time on areas such as the 5th and 12th greens talking about every aspect of our maintenance practices as well as the environment in which they are located We also spent extra time looking at the areas in our fairways that were severely beat up during the verticutting and aerification process.
In general speaking we are doing most things right. His recommendations, again, generally speaking is that more aerification, more top dressing, more sunlight, and more air movement will improve turf conditions, and thus the overall health of the turf. We already knew all that and continue to make head way in that direction within the limits of the budget, and such things as the TRCA which dictate what trees we are allowed to cut down.
One thing we identified was a weedy grass prevalent in our fairways. Most of us are familiar with Poa annua, well this turf is in the same family and has also caused us grief.
The grass I am talking about is Poa Trivialis. This turf is used in the southern states as an over seeding turf to Bermuda grass in the winter. If you have ever watched a golf event on TV in Arizona, you probably notice the tees, fairways and greens all look like normal healthy turf. But areas around bunkers are just brown. In that climate it’s too hot to grow Bent grass. Bermuda grass is the predominant turf in that part of the world, but it goes dormant during the cooler winters. So they over seed the flatter and main play areas with Poa Trivialis. When the heat returns the Bermuda grass wakes up and out competes the Poa that is under sever stress from the heat.
Poa Trivialis is as much a weed as its brother Poa annua. This grass probably came in contaminated seed used to over seed fairways in the mid to late 90’s. At that time, seed companies ensured their quality by only focussing on the fact that there was no contamination from bluegrass or rye grass in their bent grass seed cultivars.
Because of the weak growth habit of this turf, and how it thatches up, it was easily ripped up during our normal fairway program. Areas that stood up well are predominantly Bent grass. So what’s the solution for the future? Well, that’s mainly going to depend on budget and how we want to handle it. There is a herbicide available that will help to choke this weed out but it is expensive, and it will also makes the rest of the fairway turn a sickly yellow. Another option might be to aggressively verticut once a year knowing this Poa Trivialis will be torn out, then aggressively over seed with bent. Either way there is no magic bullet to rid our fairways from this invasive weed.
All recommendations from the agronomists visit will be made available to all members in his detailed report which we should have in the next few weeks.

I heard my first comment yesterday that the green are too fast, so safe to say the vast majority of the healing is complete with all other areas continuing to improve. We have a vast amount of seed in many areas which continue to germinate and heal.
Clubs leaving their aerification programs to October will enter the winter in a weakened state and risk higher possibility of winter kill from many different weather patterns.
All our programs are scheduled to prepare the turf for the most stressful times of the season which are through the summer and winter seasons. As always we review everything about all maintenance programs and timing, and make recommendations for how to improve for the least possible disruption to members play. Safe to say we already have a number of improvements to implement for 2013.

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