Course Update - July 23

After 15 days with no rain and high temperatures the golf course is many shades of yellow, brown and green. While I have taken many precautions to prevent turf loss such as raising mower heights, reducing mowing frequency, rolling, and many hours of syringing with a hose we still have large areas of damage on the course. Some of these areas are stressed due to poor irrigation, rocky soil, areas with limited air movement, shade, and competition from shrubs. These are the factors of why the turf is dying but the reason is that Poa Annua has filled in these areas over the years. Poa Annua loves these types of areas until it get hot then it begins to struggle and die. Although this should be no surprise considering the name of the plant tells you it’s going to die, "annua" Latin for annual. In the short term these areas will be nursed with water and fertilizer to help recovery as the weather improves. The long-term solution is to remove trees for increased air movement and allow for more sun, continue to aerate on a regular basis, increase the efficiency of our irrigation system, and overseed with bentgrass. All of these processes will be dealt with in the coming months as well as the construction of a new putting green nursery. This nursery will give us the ability to sod areas on greens that have damage in a quick fashion using our own sod. The construction of this nursery will begin in August and be ready for use in the 2012 season. I will write more about this later as I have to get back to my hose and the syringing of greens and fairways.