Catching up on tree work

As frost and cold weather has finally hit, we are now into that winter season where we concentrate more on projects than of keeping the grass cut.  Not to say we are still doing a little of cutting grass here in the transition zone.  When we do have some decent weather, we still try to maintain a semblance of maintaining the golf course for play, because we can see a decent amount of play even in the winter.

Luckily for us, any large tree work, removing or pruning which occurs with our larger trees, we benefit with our employer have a full time tree crew.  They will when requested come out and do plenty of work on trees that we just don't have the staff or equipment to handle.

What we tend to concentrate on is pruning hanging branches and taking care of our smaller newer trees.  Back in 2007 we had the fortunate or unfortunate (all depends on one's perspective) problem of losing about 200 trees on our golf course to one of the worst ice storms in our area since our course was built in the early 1960's.  During this ice storm we lost about 200 trees on an 100 acre golf course.  Unfortunately this was before smart phones and what pictures I have of that time I've still not put into a digital format.  Over the 2014 and 15 seasons we did replace about a 180 trees.  Fortunately we were able to do a better job of placing them then the previous placements over the years before I arrived.  Many of the lost trees were large elms, arranged in straight rows.  We planted a wider variety of trees from hardwoods to evergreens.  When placing these new trees we were looking more at placing them for safety reasons than as hazards.  We were also able to watch for creating shade issues for the turf.  In the mid 2000's we changed fairways and tees from a cool season turf to warm season Bermuda.  We did learn to avoid the straight lines of old and grouped them a little more, I felt staggered groups would offer better protection and a little more visual interests once they mature.  Again with the large amount of trees to be planted we were grateful for the tree crew.  I marked the locations with the type of trees that had been selected for us, hoping I have found the right locations for the many different varieties. 

 
          
We have managed a good survival rate or dare I say great, through some effort and luck.  I've always heard a good survival rate in mass plantings are above 50 % on up to about 70%.  We achieved so far about 90%, like I mentioned, due to luck, and some tools like water drip bags, and also hauling an old spray tank around.  And I'm sure aided by irrigation as well.   

                                                

Now onto our recent tree projects.  We have never really concentrated on cleaning up around our evergreens, just trying to weedeat the best we could.  Partly because of staffing and also because I was always concerned that by removing the lower limbs, they wouldn't offer golfer protection as well.  As I felt their locations afforded protection from errant shots on neighboring fairways.  Finally after seeing them look trashy with not only grasses but other plants growing in and among them like mulberry bushes, we decided to address them. 

Above you can see some of the plant materials we were finding under some of our pine trees.  We originally started with removing limbs about knee high, when we didn't feel we had removed enough material, we went up to waste high.  The pictures below show a before and after shot from the same location.  This allowed us to achieve the goals we had set for this project. 

 

 

The goals we had set out to accomplish were the following:

• We wanted to clean up the areas under these trees just so we could provide a better look on the golf course.
• We wanted to make it easier to maintain the areas under these trees.  We can actually get mower decks under them.
• We wanted the trees to still provide for some protection from errant shots on neighboring holes.
• We wanted to provide for a little more air circulation then prior.
• And finally, we wanted anyone behind those trees to be able to have an opportunity to possible play a shot, or at least advance the ball.   

The last goal is something of an opinion that I have developed over time from my first impression of trees on the golf course, as I grew up playing the game, to one that I have now .  Some of that growth comes from the knowledge of how trees can be a detriment to the growing of good turf.  Part of the opinion comes from my knowledge of fairness and enjoyment of playing golf from my earliest days until now.  Something that I will explore later in another post.  Hopefully that post will bring some discussions about how we look at playing the game.  Part of my reason for starting this blog, to explore the game as a game and as a business. 

As always,

Thanks for reading!

Mel     

Fall a Great Time to Spray Weeds

We have just finished up our fall rough spraying of broadleaf and clover today.  We have been working on spraying areas of our roughs which are mostly fescue over the last few weeks, working around weather and mowing. 

It sounds like this might be late in the season for these applications, but last year when we really went after our weed issues in our roughs, we saw the great rewards this spring.  While I don't have pictures that justify the results, we could visually see the two boom passes I made last fall, where dandelions were absent and clover populations were less. 

This year I decided to expand the areas in the roughs to where I was making three to four passes with the sprayer to spray the clover and broadleaf weeds.  The results so far have been good. 

As you can see, there are some areas where the fescue roughs are really thin.  Part of this issue is these areas have never been fertilized in the 13 years I have been here, it has never been part of the budget.  Of course the thin turf leads to these specific weed problems.  But at a cost of $12.45 an acre, we are able to treat these areas for weeds.

We can't apply a fertilizer for that price.  Our golfers don't seem to have an issue, well except when we do have a lot of rain and we fall somewhat behind in mowing our roughs. 


I am hoping to look into at least fertilizing green and tee banks, and maybe a couple of roughs a year.  But when budgets are tight, the first area I cut is roughs, so in turn I can support the programs developed for greens, tees and fairways.



I do remember at a previous course, I had arrived to find tremendous grub damage and weak roughs.  I set forth that next season to treat all the roughs, (well the whole course actually) 90 acres with a fertilizer/insecticide combo product.  At the time the cost was $150 an acre (now with the insecticide being off patent, we can make the same applications for $60-75 per acre).  So we treated for a total cost of $13,500 dollars.  The following year we had to make some cuts, and after attending a seminar (where the observation was made, about beetles not laying eggs in far areas of the golf course that were not irrigated) and looking at our grub issues after that initial application, I decided to only treat 50 acres for a savings of $7,500.  All the while I was able to save and continue a greens program that was working great, and also my other fertilizer programs.  This provides some strong healthy weed free turf.  So weed free in fact that when a visiting turfgrass extension professor visited the course he asked what I was using for a pre-emergent, I said nothing since we couldn't afford it.  (Of course I didn't know the history and the previous superintendents could have been applying pre-emergent out the wazoo).  After that my motto has been the best pre-emergent is enough fertilizer. 

I do enjoy the number crunching from the discussion above, and that is our next project, to develop our agronomic plans to fit into our next budget cycle.

Thanks for reading!

Mel     

Its Learning Time

Not all of our time is spent out on the golf course, we do take advantage of educational opportunities that present themselves at many times of the year.  One of these times was last week.

The Ozark Turf Association (OTA) routinely puts on educational events for our members, but typically just one speaker for an hour on one topic, but last week we were able to put together speakers for a four hour session.  And this one wasn't just turf related, it happen to deal more with equipment, which is somewhat near and dear to me from my background attending Lake City Community College.  That program was a 3 year program that earned us an Associates of Science degree in Golf Course Operations.  Our first year was dedicated to a couple of core classes such as College English and Algebra, along with typing and accounting.  But we also had a lot of class time learning the basics of equipment repair and maintenance along with running our shops.  I will dive more into my time at Lake City in an upcoming blog.  I have to have something to talk about during the slower winter months. 

For the event we held last week, our first speaker was Stan Woodfin who is the Technical Sales Manager for Crader Distribution which distributes Stihl equipment. 

Stan presented some of the new updates that Stihl and other companies are making to their two-cycle engines.  While it was EPA emission regulations that lead to many of the updates, manufactures are finding that there are benefits for operators with these new regulations.  Engines are burning cleaner and burning less fuel as well.  This is actually saving golf courses and landscape companies money.

Stan did talk about different troubleshooting techniques that can help us diagnosis problems just by looking at different parts of the engine.



Our second speaker was John Daniels from the USGA who spoke about Optimizing Mower Setup.  At first it seemed like an odd topic from the USGA Green Section who deals with course prep/set up and turf health.  But upon hearing his presentation it made perfect sense.

There are a lot of factors that go into setting up cutting units for fine turf such as putting greens.  We have gone from mowing at fractions to mowing in metric measurements.  We did this though in my opinion so we can tweak heights of cuts for more precision to meet the demands of the golfers for smooth and fast surfaces.  It has been made easier with dial gauges such as the "Accu Gauge"  Instead of 5/32" we will set reels to .155, 9/64' becomes .140, 1/8" becomes .125.  Or courses mow even lower, it is not uncommon for tournament greens to be mowed at .100 or lower.  I was reminded, John said it is best to invest in a Prism Gauge to find out what the true height of cut is compared to a bench setting.  Bench settings can be one height but cutting height could be different depending on the weight of the cutting unit, and also the condition of the turf.  Thatch and moisture can always play a part in how the cutting units sit in the turf.         

I worked at an university golf course with some fair college players, and we would not mow below .155 with our walking greens mowers.  What led me to that height of cut was research done at Kansas State by current Rutgers turf researcher, Bingru Huang.  She looked at root length over the summers on greens mowed at 5/32" and 1/8".  Greens mowed at 5/32" did not loose a lot of root mass compared to greens mowed at 1/8".  I have since stuck to mowing greens at my course at 5/31" or .156 (5) since.  Our greens were fast enough for those players and they did like the smoothness that that amount of turf provided.  We were able to push greens speeds a little with moisture control in the greens, plus with the slope some greens had, we didn't want them too fast, to where the ball would not stop near the hole, (given the shot played into the green was in the correct location).

The main point was to keep mowers sharp and properly adjusted in order to achieve the best playing conditions. 

Our last speaker was Matt Giese from Sygenta who had a presentation on choosing the best spray nozzles for the best performance of our products we spray.  There are many factors when choosing nozzles, which provide the best pattern for the type of product that is being used.  Also a factor can be weather patterns, mainly wind.  Also one has to find which nozzle provides the best volume of water for the product we are using. 

Usually herbicide will use the lowest volume of water providing a more concentrated spray droplet.  Of course this is for a contact herbicide that we want to stay on the plant.  Contact fungicides will want a higher volume of water to coat more of the grass plant to protect it from pathogens or to kill already existing disease. 

Droplet size also plays a part is spray drift management.  We certainly don't want pesticides to be drifting off our target plants.  With the cost of some of our products maximizing their effectiveness is very important, which is why it is so important to choose the right nozzles.  Also the right nozzle choice allows us to cover more acreage when needed, using less tanks and taking less man-hours to make some applications. 

I did have to wonder and it would be interesting to see if the different nozzles produce better results when using systemic products on a preventative basis.  But I'm sure weather and other factors play more in the process of a product lasting longer than what the spray pattern might be.  On contact products or active disease, it probably matters more on the spray pattern to coat the plant better. 

As always the more I learn in educational events, the more I think about my current programs and I evaluate what I am doing, I do find myself knowing less, it seems. 

Would love to hear comments from everyone else on educational events that you have been able to attend. 

Thanks for reading!

Mel 

Helping Hands

I was reminded again today of what a great industry and group of peers I work with in the golf maintenance industry.  I was faced with a dilemma and a couple of weeks ago I tweeted out this picture.

It is our old Rain Bird 51 DR hold up tool that we use when we are working on our old Rain Bird heads.  It unfortunately has been run over a couple times with a cart I believe.  Rain Bird themselves and some other sources did not have them, which I don't blame them, these heads were old technology when they were installed in 1993. 

I also posted this on our Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) member forum.  That is where I heard from a retired superintendent who thought his old course just might have these tools. 



This is what arrived today,  a set of tools that should work just fine for our old irrigation heads.

I will certainly look forward to getting these out to the golf course to help us with our fall irrigation head repairs.  I can't express enough my appreciation for these. 

Of course this is nothing new in our industry.  I remember long ago when we were aerating greens one year at our course in New Jersey, we had our aerator break down.  With in an hour, we were back to punching holes after a near-by course had brought theirs over to our place.  I even heard talk of sharing equipment recently at our September Scholarship and Research fundraiser.  (Fundraising and golf should be a good topic for another blog over the slow winter time.)


Yes I mentioned meetings where we will get together and play some golf, but while we do that we also talk about what we are doing at our courses, often comparing notes and ideas.  I couldn't tell how many times I have gotten ideas from colleagues to take back to my course and try and provide a better product for my golfers.  It amazes me sometimes how we are so ready to help our fellow superintendents who are at courses that we actually compete for customers.

Even at a recent Chapter Delegates meeting at our GCSAA national headquarters in Lawrence, while talking about issues that affect our local chapters and members, whenever we had breaks, or on the bus ride back to the hotel, there we were discussing our part of the business of golf.  It didn't matter if we were from different parts of the country, growing different grasses, we were finding common ideas.  Even discussing personnel issues, such as how the new Overtime law would effect our different facilities. 









And now to mention the best most recent tool when it comes to sharing information.  It is social media of course!  Blogs from people much smarter than myself, Facebook groups, and even Twitter as the posts below show a couple of ideas I have learned from.  And by the way great people to follow.

Chris was a great follow leading up to and during the Ryder Cup.  He shared many of their practices, allowing us to pick and choose what might work for us, and also allowing us to promote new ideas to our stake holders at our courses.  It is amazing how if I promote a new idea, practice, product to my bosses, how easily I can sell it when I can say they do it at "so and so club"








It would be great to hear from others the success stories you have been able to achieve from help you have received from our peers.  Would love to hear about how other golf industry professionals, such as pros and managers of stories they have of helping one another. 

I am so glad to be part of this great industry. 

Thanks for reading!

Mel

It's Aeration Time

Yes, it is aeration time or otherwise known as, why are you messing up the greens when they're perfect?

Almost two weeks ago we set out for our yearly fall greens aerification.  The reasons we do pull cores is to try and remove as much organic matter in the top 3 to 4 inches. 

As can be seen in the picture of the soil profile, the top layer shows a little bit darker soil mix from the bottom of the profile which is the original greens mix.  We pull that organic matter out and replace it with fresh sand.  I do have some concern of the darker soil at about the 4-5" depth, where we are not able to get sand into that area of the profile at this time.  

Above are a couple of cores that we removed.  The one shows the depth of 3 inches and the other shows some of the root mass.  I believe some of that is from our solid tine aerations during the summer.  Those summer aerations or as I have learned to call them, venting's, are helpful to relieve compaction, just as a core aeration does, but it also allows for oxygen to get into wet soils.  The core aeration also helps remove some surface organic matter we will call thatch.  We also verticut to remove some of that thatch and will topdress to dilute the thatch as well. 

Prior to our first day of aeration we will verticut greens, figuring this is the perfect time to get one of the practices in (we try to verticut 4 times in the spring and 4 times in the fall weather and schedules permitting).  We begin pulling cores early while still dark and will start the process of picking up those cores.

      

  We are blessed to see a great sunrise due to starting so early.  Once the green is cleared and before we topdress, we will blow off any loose debris.

We will then topdress greens with about an 1" layer of sand, and will let that sand dry for most of the morning.  When we have felt some of it has dried enough, we start to drag that sand in using metal drag mats.  We are hoping to pick up the dry sand and have it start falling and filling in the aerations holes. 

We will then let that sand dry some more and then do a final drag, then we will roll, and change cups so the green will be ready for the next day when we reopen that nine holes.  We will also fertilize the greens so they can heal properly. We will have already fertilized previously about a week prior to aeration so greens would be actively growing when the aeration process was started. 

         

If the weather cooperates, the greens should be back to normal, or at least to the point that we are not blamed for missing putts which is usually in 11-12 days.

With our course set up and business model, we will aerate one set of 9 holes, which will stay closed for the day.  On day two we will open up the just completed 9 and close the other.  With 2 acres of greens we can do each 9 in about 10 hours per day.  With the 6 to 7 staff members we will usually have during the process, this is what works best for us.  We will always shoot for spring aeration in the first full week of April and the fall aeration is scheduled for the first full week of October. 

I do remember working at another course with bigger staff, and at different times of the year, where we would work from sun up at 5 AM to past dark which would be between 8 and 9 PM (or later)  and would do all 3 acres of our 18 greens.  And to follow up we would have a couple of our students water after, (we had a quick coupler system there).  They loved the overtime, but I know the following day we would all be about useless. 

I would love to hear how others attack this practice. 

Thanks for reading!

Mel  

   

Irrigation or irritation?

As I attempt to be more active with this blog, I thought that maybe I could add one irrigation topic per month or so.  Well I don't know if it was perfect timing or dumb luck that yesterday was one of those irritation with irrigation days.

At this time we should take a moment of silence...... for the squirrel who caused a power outage to our pump house. 

The poor guy tripped one of these breakers on our power pole leading to the pump house.  Luckily we get great customer service from our City Utilities, it was repaired rather quickly, although that didn't quite solve the problem as there was another one of these fuses, (as I call, them, CU has a more technical name for them) popped further down the line.  With a little more help from our operations staff and CU, we all figured out other issues in our pump's control panel, and we had water running by late that afternoon. 





During that time 2 other staff members fixed 2 heads that had not been working, completing a job I had started the day before.  I knew I had 3 heads on our 18th hole not working.  So I set out to find those heads and get them on our repair list.  They were in our rough area between the blue tee on 18 and the fairway, so there wasn't a huge priority compared to other tasks, but when situations presented themselves we worked to get them repaired. 

When I found the 3 heads that had been grass covered and had not been working for a while, they were all sunken below ground level by a fair amount.  I edged them to our standard, although edging is usually low on the to do list as much as I would like it to be higher.  We have 3 requirements for an edged head, # 1 is the head should be visible for golfers as most would have a yardage tag to let the player know the distance to the green.  (Yes I know we have GPS in our carts, but we do have many walkers, especially our juniors who have a fair number of tournaments on our course.)  # 2, the head should have grass cleared away to operate properly, and be leveled, and # 3 is for our Rain Bird valve-in heads, we need to have access to the valve key on the side.  Prior to edging, none of the standards had been met.  Plus the head would not turn on from the control box.  After some quick diagnosis with our multi meter, I was able to confirm the issue was the coil on the head. 

Since we had enough people cooling off greens on the unusually hot day for late September, I decided to go ahead and at least get one of the heads working.  This meant digging up the head to replace the coil, and while I had it dug up, I should go ahead and level the head.  For that I had to dig up the swing joint. 

 The first step was to dig out the coil, (the green part, which when charged with electricity, pulls a internal plunger which allows the valve on the bottom to open and the head to operate.  A description that I my words can not do justice, probably a good winter discussion with proper diagrams)

Once exposed I could cut the wires and remove the old coil. 

 Once removed, the new coil is installed on the head and the wires from the coil are connected to the wires from the control box and held together by wire nuts. 

Once that is done, the wire nuts are inserted into plastic tubes containing grease which will keep the moisture out of the connections.  Commonly they are referred to as DBY's or DBR's  y for yellow wire nuts and r for red wire nuts, of course that makes it easy for me to figure out, but they are also dictated by how many wires one is typically splicing together, the reds will accept more wires. 






Once this was done I proceeded to dig out the swing joint so I could level the head.  The swing joint allows some flexibility if a piece of equipment were to drive over the head without breaking the head off at the irrigation line.  When I was growing up in Florida, I was on a crew that was getting a course ready to open, back in those days, when irrigation heads were installed, they where raised above the ground so when watering in the sprigs of Bermuda, sand would not find its way into the head.  We were lowering the heads, and as luck or poor work would have it, our fairway mower, an old Toro Parkmaster ran right over a head we had just lowered and not packed properly snapping the whole head and swing joint off.  I never seen a Parkmaster drove in 4th gear on the course before, as the operator drove in to report the geyser. 

                

As the above pictures show, the swing joint allows the head to be adjusted up or down to be level.  Resulting in a level head as seen below. 

Thanks for reading!

Mel

How Quickly Things Change

It had been a great summer, so much better than 2015, but that is another story for another day.

We had finished July and started August in pretty good darn shape.  Our new summer staff had kept up with the task of cooling greens, I had done a better job of not only monitoring soil moisture using our TDR300, (great tool that should be in a future post), I had also the information from an on-site ET gauge, which allowed me to actually set more accurate irrigation run times, (another topic for a later post).  Even though we had a stretch of 90 degree days along with one day hitting 100, and continuing in the 90's that first week of August, the greens had survived. 

How bad is usually the first week of August in the Ozarks?  I did most of my growing up in Spring Hill, Florida, an hour north of Tampa pretty near the west coast.  When we would travel from Florida to the Ozarks to celebrate my Grandma's birthday at that time, it was me who couldn't wait to get back home to Florida where the weather was better. 

We even saw a great forecast for that second week of August, low to mid-80's for the highs.  Unfortunately the forecast was wrong, while we did see a couple of days like that, we ended up staying in the 90's while also getting some regular rain events.  The prior forecast was so good that I tried to go 14 days on my fungicide application.  Well, that didn't work out and on day 10 after a few rain events we were looking at brown patch. 

We also faced the dilemma of our greens starting to get pretty puffy due to our light topdressings being a little too light during the heat of July.  We have a small window to get things like topdressing done, so we went ahead and topdressed on schedule.  Which was the same day we saw the brown patch.  Not wanting to add fuel to that fire, I didn't water in the topdressing like normal.  The next day we made our fungicide application with a contact product and Primo, and I did not want to water that in off the plant leaves, plus we still had moisture in the soil from the 1.1" of rain we had the prior 3 days.  So the topdressing sat somewhat heating up the surface.  We finally did some spot watering the next day along with a full irrigation cycle the next morning, But by then the damage was done. 

In our normal areas of ridges, high traffic areas, and poorly constructed spots, we started seeing some of this damage.  At this point we started babying those spots, hitting with light watering throughout the day, the best we could.  It couldn't have come at a worse time as almost all of our summer staff of college students had headed back to school.  In a few weeks, we did see some improvements during our next scheduled verticutting and topdressing.  We had also aggressively spot seeded with some bentgrass seed after spiking the surface. 

We had hoped to have fertilized greens at this point but the forecast just wouldn't cooperate.  We would have a couple of nice days in the 80's but when planned fertilizer applications would get scheduled we would have another slight heat wave. 

Finally the weather has turned for the better with cooler mornings and more moderate days.  During this past week we were able to verticut and topdress again, and also spike and seeded these areas to help with the healing.  We were able to also fertilize as well.  We also luckily had a few new students start the past two weeks which will help us better keep these newly seeded areas moist and we should have a better chance of success. 

    

We were able to fertilizer which should help our healing, and also prepare us for aeration in three weeks.  We also added some bentgrass seed.  We stuck with Penn Cross which the greens were seeded with during our renovation in 1993.  I decided to stick with Penn Cross even with newer varieties, since I continue to mow greens at .156" since a majority of our  play is senior golfers and beginners, and we want them to have fun.

Again as always Thanks for reading!

Mel

A Big Thank You

It has been a fast summer, I can't believe it is winding down already.  We are in the process of getting the boy packed and back to school this week.  And this leads me to this post.

Last visit to the golf course before leaving for school.  Has to catch that last Pokémon

I want to say a big Thank You to our landscape person for the last three seasons, as she now leaves us to get started in her career field.  Leah, started with us 3 summers ago cleaning up our landscape beds.  Our previous person had stepped away 2 seasons before after well over 10 years here.  We thought by setting aside a little time each week we could stay on top of our beds, even though we had too many.  We found out quickly that we could not really devote the attention to the beds properly.  We did remove a couple but not enough.  The next spring Leah just happened to turn in an application that I luckily came across since it wasn't forwarded to us like most applications looking for golf maintenance work are.  Hers was listing gardening as the main job she was looking to do. 

Despite no formal work in the field, her major is what led me to interview her, (which she has a previous summer employee to thank for as well, I would say 2 of my top 3 seasonal help in my past 12 years here were music majors).  Most of her landscape experience was from working around her home, learning from her mom.  Her major was music education, as we talked, she had done marching band in high school and college, and I knew from that experience she had the work ethic needed.

Leah worked hard that first summer getting our beds back into shape, so much so, that she hadn't even practiced her instrument.  She finally came to me that mid July asking if she could cut back on her schedule to work on her craft.  Of course I easily agreed since she had got caught up on all our beds.  For the next two seasons she has worked part time and still has kept our beds clean, and even introduced some new plant material.  We still rely on some of our perennial plants that have been in our beds for years to come up at different times of the season, but she has improved many other beds, using a similar philosophy. 

   

   Some many fine examples of her work.  All done with little input from me.  I just asked that they would be weed free, and mulched. 

 Much of the new plant material that was introduced was by the way of taking from plants from her mom's gardens. 








As Leah has started her new career as an assistant high school band director, I will certainly miss the fine work done on our beds.  But will also miss much talk of our one common interest outside of work, that of marching bands, and Drum Corp (marching's major league), it was always fun to share stories about shows we saw, as we usually were not attending the same competitions.  The rest of the crew just aren't interested in that. 

I wish her the best of luck, and please wish me luck on finding someone to carry on her work.

Thanks for reading!

Mel