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