March Madness

Not all March Madness appears on the basketball court as the NCAA tournament has kicked off.  Although my brackets are not quite shot, I have to say my favorite remark about the tournament so far is from sports reporter Holly Rowe @sportsiren who twitted "Dear Neighbors, please don't call the fire department.  It's just me lighting my bracket on fire.  It'll burn out in a moment, like all my picks"

March madness this year occurred on the golf course in February, the 22nd to be exact.  That is when we started seeing the Forsythia start blooming. This was the earliest I remember seeing this occur.  While out sick last year during this time, I was able to go back in my notes for the previous 4 years, finding the normal time for Forsythia to bloom at our course was around the 15th, while one year it was the first week of March. 

While we use a lot of tools to help us make decisions on applications, such as soil temperatures, growing degree days, and such, using plants as indicators is still popular and useful.  This is always a good indicator to apply pre-emergent products.  We usually will start making those applications at this time, but we do look at a larger window, since we make split applications and this early one is more for crabgrass and poa.  Since we will make herbicide applications to remove cool season grasses from our Bermuda fairways, and we don't have much of a crabgrass problem, the timing isn't as critical.  We do have some goosegrass problems, so the timing of the second applications is more critical for us.    

We will normally use Round-up at a light rate of 32 oz. per acre on warmer days during March to start cleaning the fairways of poa, but it doesn't do much for our rye grass clumps.  But since we saw green up so early this year on the Bermuda, I skipped that application and went straight to Monument at the 10 gram per acre rate.  My first application was this past Monday, by Friday I was seeing some effect on some poa.  We were able to spray all fairways and all but 3 tees.  I also avoided the Round-up due to the many comments I've heard from fellow superintendents about the delay of the Bermuda breaking dormancy when using Round-up (of course it is on the label as well).  Our fairways always have had slow starts.  I certainly did not want to set them back after the green up we saw.  

As the pictures below show, the green up was on our Quickstand Bermuda and the dormant Bermuda that you see appears to be common.  I don't know why we have seen common dominate in that location, my only guess is that is where a lot of cart traffic is and there is more compaction.  This is also an area we do see a lot of goosegrass, which is usually an indicator of compaction as well.  There in the back ground, is zoysia in the approach and collar, with a bent grass green.  I hope to have a story about that in the near future.   

Some other work we did this week was pressurize the irrigation system and checking all heads and control boxes.  Besides one leak and having to  replace one station control board, the system is looking good so far.  I plan on having some more updates about our irrigation system in my next post.

Thanks again for reading!

Mel