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

Finally back

Finally something worthy of posting.  I have been gone too long from this blog, but really I haven't had much interesting to post.  The 3 of us full timers and a couple of retired guys have been working on just keeping up with regular maintenance items with the warmer spring we have had.  Irrigation is now charged and running, with the to do list of repairs getting longer.  At least the two leaks are fixed, it is mostly repairing irrigation boxes.  Pre-emergent applications have been made, weeds have been sprayed.  And we have seeded and aerated some rough areas that had been beat down by our higher than normal winter play. 

The one project that I had been wanting to write about is half finished.  Well the part on the golf course is finished.  We have planted more Wildflower seeds in our low maintenance areas.  We had planted wildflowers on in one section of closest to the clubhouse last season and had a great result, well until the ragweed took over in the late summer, prompting me to have us mow it down early.  We seeded that area again, hoping along with the existing seeds will bring in an even better result this season.  We also added another area on the north side of the low maintenance area this season.  The pictures are kind of boring as it is just showing our mowed down field.  If last year is any indication, we will start seeing some flowers later this month.  When that happens I will post them.  The other half of that project is in the beginning stages.  We have a field to the west of our maintenance building which is perfect for test plots and nurseries.  We plan on planting some Wildflower plots in a small area to try a couple of ideas, one being playing with a pre-emergent to see if it will help with the ragweed in out Wildflowers.

Our other big project finished last week was greens aerification.  We always aerify our greens the first full week of April.  With some help from one of our other courses, we were able to knock out 18 holes rather efficiently, even as we were trying to beat Mother Nature.  And Mother Nature will always win.  Below are some pictures of our progress.  We are still old school and haven't started topdressing prior to aerating.  After the sand is drug in, we will fertilizer with some Ammonium Sulfate and water.  We will go quite a few days before mowing.  Depending on how the sand had worked in, we will occasionally drag some more and roll greens. 

The guys did a great job, we do nine holes a day, and we usually are finished with most of the process with-in an 8 hour window.  I will stay late to keep watering in sand and fertilizer.  This is our process here.  I have worked at courses where we actually stayed and aerated all day from sun up to sun down.  Then a couple of our kids stayed into the night watering, (manual system).  We were pretty useless that next day.  I don't think I've worked at any course where we have done it the same exact way, each course being a little different, mostly because of staffing and different equipment. 

Thanks so much for reading!! 

Guys setup to pick up plugs

Core collector has been a great tool for us

Topdressing down, beginning to drag

Early start trying to beat the rain

Process of dragging topdressing in

First drag done

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