Poa or Bent?

Let's start at the beginning. In 2010 the US open was at Pebble Beach. The USGA decided to use the venue to start a conversation about water. They did this by shutting it off at this iconic seaside course. The result was an off-color HD camera defying event that had everyone talking. For us it was a conversation about the types of grasses we have on our greens. The answer is a mix of the original South German Bents (Creeping Bentgrass) we were seeded to, a few others that had been sprinkled in over the years, and lots of perennial bio types of annual bluegrass (Poa Annua). For a deep dive into Seed So which is better? Well that depends who you ask. Oakmont CC loves their Poa and who could argue with the conditions we have seen there over the years? By and large creeping bent is considered a better grass for a variety of reasons: it uses less water, is more disease and heat tolerant, has better roots. With summers here getting hotter and more humid I suggested we try and favor Bent. This began the journey of our shift in how we water greens and even fertilize them, but that is more recent. We went from basically daily watering to essentially weekly. Deep and infrequent favors bentgrass and its ability to put down deep roots. This gives it the competitive edge over poa especially in the heat of the summer. Other changes in the program were to step up the chemical regulation of growth. Again, slowing the poa so the bent could out compete. My goal was a slow transition that would not effect ball roll or the overall appearance of the greens. The poster child was number 2. This green had the most poa at approximately 80%. The picture below shows vandalism in 2002. We stripped the damaged sod and replaced with sod from the nursery. The ring of bentgrass was clearly visible in a mostly poa green for many years. Today you cannot find it if you tried. The last picture, in the collage, is recent showing where I seeded the remaining poa areas and topdressed with white sand. Easily a complete swap in percentages. Most of the other greens simply converted over without anyone noticing. 

2 green from mostly poa to mostly bent

The other way we have helped the conversion is to toss a few cup cutter plugs from the nursery into the larger patches of poa. The nursery was constructed from aerifier plugs so it would match the existing greens but also seeded with bent. The dry conditions of the nursery favored bent and so there is not much poa left. These plugs would then spread to increase our bent population.

2 green this winter showing some plug work

The areas of poa left on two green have not been happy all year. My guess is the reduced fertility this year is really stressing it to the max. It looks awful on two and also back in the nursery where I moved some plugs back in January. I decided it was time to start seeding these areas. The pictures below show some seeded areas on 2 and 3 greens.

seeding process. straight sand and sprayed area

After a conversation with a friend who used to make his own dyed sand I decided to try it. I mixed up a batch and spread it on some plywood to dry. Even dried the surface still had a crust making it look wet. It was a paste when I spread it out. Reminded me of the paste glue we used in kindergarten only green.

dying sand

It has become standard fair to cut cups and have the entire plug stay together. In the past during the hot summer months the roots would shrink and the plugs would break apart into pancakes. I was reminded of this recently when I swapped out a few more plugs from the nursery to number 2. The difference in rooting depth of the two grasses is real and evident in the pictures below. Notice the roots hanging below the bent plug which is at least twice the depth of the poa plug.

regular greens plug vs straight poa plug

2 green poa plugs looking weak in nursery

There have been side effects to this new program. The poa has been a bit off color for years. Thank-you for not getting fixated on color. If I could change the culture in America that grass always has to have the deep green you see in fertilizer commercials I would. The surrounds took a beating for years. It needs more water than we had been giving it and went dormant for many years. We have figured out a solution, albeit not a great long term one, and we have improved them in the last couple of years. Lastly, another big change is with more bent grass walking has become noticeable. Or maybe better put shuffling has become an issue. Anyone dragging their feet really stands up the bent grass leaving the green a mine field to put on. That is an entire blog post itself i will save for the future.

Tree work. Removing the emotion

My Twitter feed is full of pictures and videos of trees coming down. This is all over the country but mostly in cold climates since it is the off-season. This is not a coincidence. It is always interesting to me that we superintendents get labeled as tree haters. I can only speak for myself but I think most of my peers are of a similar mind. We love trees. Who doesn't have fond memories as a child climbing a tree and each year getting just a little bit higher? Who doesn't enjoy the shade of a big tree on a hot summer day? Who has not played in a giant pile of leaves in the fall? The issue is that our livelihood is to grow quality turfgrass and trees and grass are in direct competition. We all hate trees in bad places. Does anybody who has a pool love the tree that is too close and always dropping stuff into it? It adds to the cost of maintaining the pool. If you are the one cleaning it you know it adds a lot of time. The same goes for bunkers. Our 3rd and 4th greens had this issue. We filled in the one on 4 a couple of years ago and I do not miss having to clean it out all the time. This past week we made a dent in removing the trees over the bunker on 3. The area is a site to behold, in my opinion, and pictures do not do it justice. The approach to this green was choked so heavily by trees that once removed it is nothing short of dramatic. It has allowed some sunlight to reach the green but we still need a few more to come down to have any real impact in that department. I cannot wait to fill the stump holes and regrade the area.

3 Before

3 After

When I stood on the path and looked around taking in the entire area from a players perspective the first thought that came to me was I need to shrink this path. Before there was no shot to the green from this area so it did not make a difference. Now the right side is completely different and the path seems to be out in the playing area. It is weird how the perspective is so different with such a simple change. I say simple but if you put emotion into every tree decision it can be a monumental task to even remove one tree. As superintendents we have to temper that emotion and through experiences similar to this we know how much improvement can be gained by removing trees. As I said above we have not gained the needed the sunlight benefits and more need to come down but the goal of playability improvement has been accomplished.

9th hole looking towards tee

9th hole towards green

Not all trees require saws and chippers. The landowner project on nine a few years ago removed several pines on the hillside for their water view enhancement. It improved the playability immensely. Before, any shots left would rattle around in the trees and you had to punch out, usually sideways from behind pine trees. Now you can not only see the green but actually try to make a shot to it. We will save the discussion of the old 150 yard cedar in the picture for another day. Well, these invasive black pines are trying to colonize this grassy hillside once more. Brush cutting and some chemical sprays have not really slowed them down. It is a steep bank to spray or mow and I think you know my feelings about chemical use. Yesterday I looked at the area for the hundredth time trying to figure out what to do and decided to see if pulling them by hand would work. Not the easiest job but in a couple of hours I put a good dent. Next will be dealing with the little bluestem invasion. The last thing we need is thick clumps of bluestem on this hill so you cannot find or play your ball. Last year I tried spraying roundup on a few clumps and simply killing them. Risky since it might kill any other grass as well but other chemical attempts have not been very successful. Spot spraying uses a lot less chemical and is safer. The goal is to have a tall grass area where the ball may roll out on its own but if not, easily found and played. A holy grail perhaps but all tall rough areas are a challenge and balancing act for playability.

Dancing on the edge

There are many issues to face when growing plants for a living. Mostly they revolve around weather extremes: too wet/dry, cold/hot, wind, sun; you get the idea. I have discussed Winterkill a number of times in these pages. It is a catch all term we use to describe when plants die during winter. There are many forms such as desiccation. Twitter was filled with people talking about watering dormant grass in the middle areas of the country because it was so dry a few weeks back. That is a headache I am happy I have never faced. Our issues here are usually too much water in the winter. Another form of death is crown hydration. The crown is where the shoots and roots originate and hopefully is just below the soil surface. If the ground becomes saturated then freezes repeatedly this can disrupt the plants antifreeze and abilities to fight off the stresses of cold. Ever freeze a vegetable and when it thaws it becomes a soggy mess? That is the biggest issue we are facing right now. The rain on frozen ground settled in low spots mostly and formed ice. Now as this ice melts if temps drop at night all that free moisture re-freezes. The following pictures show some of the trouble spots on the course:

5 green low spot in middle

2 green saturated in afternoon then frozen solid again at night

8 green melting but saturated in dark areas

We are heading into a warming trend for a few days with night temps staying above freezing so we should lose the frost in the ground and the ice on the surface. The forecast is for torrential rains Saturday and then back to below freezing again, so we may be back to the same cycle. That repeated cycle of freeze thaw is flirting with disaster and dancing on the edge. This graphic is from Twitter and explains why we will not be open until the frost is completely gone:

Play for us this time of year is the 4 F's: Frost Free or Fully Frozen

During the melting it is too soft to do much on the course. Many greens are full of debris and will need to be cleaned up before we can open them. We cannot get on them until they are firm. otherwise we will be the one's doing the damage in the picture below. I say all this because I had to ask a golfer to leave the property yesterday. Just because it is 40 degrees does not mean we are open. I have more sympathy than any Greenkeeper I know when it comes to allowing winter play on greens, but I have to think of the overall health over a golfer's boredom.

3 green

This was 12/20/17 8:28 am during the last thaw. The golfer was already on 5 tee before I caught up to them. Frost in green but surface thawing exactly the situation in the graphic above. The closed sign blew down. Yesterday the golfer didn't even notice there are no pins on the course. This blog was created to educate. Hard to accomplish when people are unwilling to learn or do not have any common sense. We may yet be able to open this week but I cannot predict how fast the frost will come out of the ground. All the boredom and eagerness to be out playing will not change that or speed it up. Trust that I will let you out there as soon as I can. If you want to be outside enjoying the weather and want to be here and help, come on out we could always use the help cleaning up debris from storms.

11:15AM 1/9/18

Science project - Poa Seed head Suppression

There have been some changes in the way we use a plant health product called Proxy. Most of our products come out of the Agriculture industry. This product is used as a growth regulator and specifically to suppress annual bluegrass seed head production. This is very important on putting greens since the production of these seed heads make the greens bumpy for weeks. I have been making two applications in the Spring for years. The change has been to apply one application in the late Fall. I decided to try this with our last spray of the season. When it came time to spray the nursery I decided to skip a few spots to test whether the late season application made a difference. I add a dye to the last spray of the season to keep the greens darker for the Winter. This helps absorb sunlight and heat things up over the off-season. It also made it obvious where we had skipped this last spray.

Early Spring

After late March application 

Early Spring non-sprayed plot

Different angle of the non-sprayed plot above after second spray

By again skipping various areas we have a full blown trial going on. With check plots that have neither the November nor March applications "CK", Spring only "SO", Fall only "FO", and Both "B". In university research trials there are usually triplicates, exact size plots and many other strict protocols which I may not have followed but it is still a neat thing to see.  

In the Spring application I added iron or Ferrous Sulfate (FeSo4) to again add a little color. This will not last as long as a dye so I have more control of the color of the greens. I skipped a section on most of the greens as a test in addition to the nursery. These skips would then all be Fall only plots. Iron really works to turn grass green as you can see in the skips on 2 and 3 greens pictured here.

Eventually we should see patches of white seed heads. Or at least more seed heads in these areas, but who knows? That is why we do these tests to see how the products we use work here on this property.

Back to Basics sort of

Most golfers know that aerification or the process of poking holes in the ground is necessary. Whether you pull cores out or simply make a hole with solid tines. The benefits are numerous and explained ad nauseum in every turf newsletter and blog all over the world. In agriculture you can gain the same benefits of relieving compaction,  adding amendments, improving soil health and drainage etc by tilling. There is a trend now to call aerifying vertical tilling because of the similarities. We have purchased a new tractor and aerifier. We used to contract out a deeptine aerification for greens every year. Now we can do it ourselves and also use the machine everywhere else. Or can we?

worn out after a couple of fairways VS new

You saw in a previous post how we hit some rocks on 9 fairway. We also have seen a very noticeable difference in how the aerified fairways take water. We have had over 7" of rain in the past month and those fairways are much firmer and drier which means they will be playable faster. That's a good thing right? Kind of the point of going as deep as we can. Today I put on a fresh set of tines so we can continue the process. We have only done 1,9,5 & 7 fairways so far and with 5 & 7 the tines were pretty worn so not penetrating as deep. I also tried to turn on the irrigation system today and did not get far. There was water coming out of a pipe on 1 in several places. The 1st rule of irrigation installation is to put it below aerifier depth. At least a foot is standard if not 18" and anything less than 10" is a Cardinal sin. I was able to isolate the leaking pipe and continue my scouting of the course. I opened a bunch of valves to let the air out. Upon my return to number one I saw another spot with water coming out close to a sprinkler but not on the pipe feeding it. That usually means abandoned galvanized pipe from the original 1936 system still in place. Never a good thing. I did a quick exploratory hole and sure enough it is exactly that. The surprising thing is the depth. It is only three inches down. Sadly I expect this sort of thing on our plastic system installed in the early 90's but with the original mainline being at 6-7 feet in most places I assume the pipes connected to it are deeper than 3 inches.

single tine hole in pipe?

Multiple holes?

Maybe 3" deep. Notice plastic cap on end of  galvi pipe

So now the question becomes do we continue this process? The old fairway aerifier was only capable of going  4-6" deep. We never hit any pipe but did so much turf damage with it we stopped using it over a decade ago switching to spiking them instead. The fairways seem to be OK but they really are a house of cards. Any stress and they fall apart. As mentioned the aerified ones are taking water much better which means not closing them to carts as often or for as long. Real proof of the value of this process. There are many other benefits that will not be as noticeable such as deeper roots. If I set the machine shallower the benefits will be reduced but also what depth to choose? The galvi on one is 3" and it almost seems a waste of time to only go that deep. I feel like the accountant who knows that reconciling the books is a good thing but every time I do the computer breaks and adds more work. The basics of aerifying and reconciling the check book are fundamental to good business practices but you can get by without them for a little while. The auditor who has to deal with the books not reconciled will not be happy. Our audit comes in the form of stress whether rainfall, too much or too little, or temperature. Our fairways slide every summer as the stresses take their toll. I know how to improve them to keep this from happening. I even have the tool now to accomplish this task. What I don't know is how much damage I will do to the irrigation system trying to perform this basic cultural practice. The beauty of having an old course with outdated infrastructure. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Other than that it should be a great Masters Sunday. I was even able to see the logo on the course first thing this morning:

Happy Chris Morse

Vote for Bert! Some rock play and oh yeah first mowing too

I was going to write a post about a visit Chris and I made to the Island Grown Initiative this week but I will save that for next week. We have had a very busy and interesting week. We mowed greens and collars today so that is always exciting and a sign of Spring. I aerified the 9th and 1st fairways with our new machine. We can get deeper with this machine than our old one. The old one always seemed to tear up huge chunks of grass so I gave up using it many years ago. We did not tear up much turf but we did bend a bunch of tines. I went out to investigate each spot so I could remove the obstacle so we would not bend tines next time. Interesting results.

OUCH!!

About a 1/2 dozen holes

Notice the white roots on bottom of left piece of sod. All rock there.

First mowing under a Full Moon I entered Me and Bert in a contest Bayer is having. I need you all to vote on every device you have every day until it ends so my local chapter can win $2K and I can win some free plant medicine. Click the link and follow simple directions. VOTE FOR BERT Georgie White took this when Bert joined us for our last hole in a tournament last year

Winter Injury Update

Chris and I went to a seminar this week and I showed the pictures to a few peers and it seems we are not alone with this malady. A course out on Cape Cod has a similar look in the rough and another in Middletown RI confirmed the same odd patterns. I also saw some on Woods Hole GC on the way back to the boat. Misery loves company. The other good news is the plugs I brought into my office on Monday had greened up by Wednesday morning. Not a guarantee that every inch of the afflicted turf will do the same but it appears to prove that the damage is superficial. It should grow out of it when the weather cooperates. We had rain and 60 degrees so that was a good start. Of course it is 34 right now so who knows how much progress we are making. I sent off some samples to the lab at URI where they will check it for disease and hopefully confirm my diagnosis of cold temperature injury. My guess is that we were so warm at times this winter that the plants started to break dormancy. Once they begin to grow a little and lose the antifreeze they build up inside their cells they are susceptible to cold temperatures. Not much we can do to change the weather. By the time most of you return this should be a distant memory.

plugs in office after 2 days

8 fwy Thursday morning looking greener?

8 fwy Lots of green showing

Winter Injury

Well we were plodding along with a fairly easy Winter so far. We have had some snow but it seemed to melt quickly. We have been open and on the greens most of the season as well since very little frost built up in the ground. Once the snow melted we were good to go. We had a severe cold snap back on Valentines Day weekend but had snow cover so I thought we would be protected. The snow melted and we once again cleaned off the greens and opened up. By all accounts it then took a few more days for these symptoms to appear. If it is direct cold temperature injury was it just a perfect storm of warm weather and a severe cold snap? The plants have certainly been acting funny with a flowering dandelion spotted on 5 earlier.The damage is on 3,4,8 and 9. Very little on 6 and 7 fairways. To be clear I do not know what this is and have never seen anything like it, ever. My first reaction seeing this up close was it reminded me of a slide I have seen in seminars of cold temperature injury to Bermuda grass. I have a couple samples in my office incubating to see if they are alive. I will also send out a couple samples to a lab and see what they say.

Winter injury on Bermuda from Internet

3 fairway

3 fairway

4 rough

6 fairway/rough

8 fairway

8 green, collar, and rough

9 fairway

8 green under microscope - leaf damage

Weather Data from our station

Aside form the odd looking patterns that resemble the picture taken from the Internet why are the x-country ski tracks still green? The pressure compacted the snow and it insulated the grass more? Hopefully I will have answers for you in the next post. Hopefully the damage is just to the leaf tissue and not the crowns of the plant. So much for an easy Winter.

End of August update - reminder Greens Aerifying 9/8

It was wonderful to have the humidity break finally. Seemed like a month rather than a week or so of hot sticky weather. The forecast is for a couple more days then the humidity returns and I am hearing September will be warmer than normal. Should make for some great golfing. The course has held up OK this season. We have a few lumps to repair and a bit of dry weather stress that needs more rain to recover but all in all it is still playing very nicely. I will apply a gypsum application to help flush the salinity build up from the summer's irrigating. This will help firm up the surface and help us drain a little better. When the salt builds up at the surface it really messes with the physical properties of the soil. Think of your salt shaker in summer time where the grains are all stuck together and will not flow out through the little holes in the top. Soil particles do the same thing and the surface gets squishy and soft. This will hamper water flow and seal off the surface. With the intrusion into our well it is a constant issue we have to deal with much like sugar levels as a diabetic. And sometimes we simply have to apply gypsum as a corrective measure. We finally get a few rain events and they turn the place into quicksand. It makes the divots and ball marks worse and easier for carts and mowers to do damage while driving around. Of course you can still always replace your divot and repair your ball mark unlike the pictures below:

Crazy amount of abuse going on lately. Big divots and none being replaced. We do not have the time to follow every golfer and clean up after them.

With the recent rains the greens are soft and the number of ball marks increase. Sadly they also do not seem to be getting repaired either. Remember the proper way is to pull the good grass into the middle. Do NOT pry up from the bottom as you see most PGA tour pros do. What the heck do they know about turf maintenance anyway?

water just sitting on the surface 1 fwy

Bert is enjoying the poor drainage at least

We have been seeing a lot of deer on the property lately. It has become a daily occurrence and not just the same group either. Not sure what that means but if the Farmer's Almanac prediction of a "snowy and bitter cold" winter is to be believed maybe they are fattening up in preparation?

Mother and daughter on 1 fwy Cousin on 3 fwy below on the same morning

She was here early when we hosed the dew and stayed for at least an hour munching

We are just a little over a week away from our greens aerifying on Tuesday September 8th. Greens will be closed all day for this procedure. Thank-you for your patience while we perform this necessary task.