The road to recovery

Despite all the activities going on in the grounds department these days, I would like to start with an excuse.  I haven't blogged since tournament week as I've been a little distracted by the birth of my first child.  On Wednesday, July 24th at 6:30 pm my wife Catlynn gave birth to an 8 lb 1 oz little girl named Lyla Symmes Salois.  Mom and baby are both doing great and I am extremely thrilled to start a new chapter in my life.

1 Day old Lyla

Touchdown!!

On a less happy note, I would like to copy and paste a preview of the August newsletter to the members.  I have written about dead grass for the last several weeks and I think this will be the last of it.  We have begun to travel down the road to recovery and that's what we will talk about for the next few months.  Mother Nature seems to be cooperating with the unseasonably cool and pleasant August, so it's onward and upward from here.  Quite frankly I'm sick to my stomach about course conditions right now, but there's no sense crying over spilled milk at this point.  All we can do is move forward and make the best out of it.  Below is my analog newsletter preview for August.

August 2013 Highlander

With the Marathon Classic behind us, the course you got back after the tournament is not the same course you had before.  Our mild summer turned severe at just the right time to do some significant damage to our fairways.  Low areas, poorly drained areas, and high cart traffic areas with high amounts of Poa annua have suffered.

As you all know, we had 18 days of rain and saturation leading up to the Marathon Classic.  The course was very wet, and standing water remained in some areas for weeks despite our best efforts to remove it.  There are four main components that combined to create the damage you see.

1.      1.  Mower and Cart Damage – Weeks of rain prevented us from mowing some areas for extended periods.  While the course was still a little wet, we were forced to throw our large fairway mowers back out to get the fairways back down to their proper height.  Also, while the course was still quite wet, we allowed carts.  When wet and soft areas are driven on or mowed, the stress on the plant is magnified.  Root systems are compacted, shifted, and the short-rooted Poa annua plant is weakened.  Once the weather turned from cold and wet to hot and humid, the weakest plants began to simply melt away.

2.      2.  Fungal Pressure – As always, the hot and humid conditions turned the wet golf course into a large “petri dish” that fungus loves to grow on.  Every year, we spray a multitude of chemicals to prevent fungal disease, but when conditions are so perfect for development, even the best chemicals will only control a percentage of the total infection.  Also, when plants are already weakened by mechanical damage and heat, the plants become exponentially more susceptible to infection.  Most of the lost turf is not directly related to fungal disease, but it is a large contributor to an overall weakened stand of turf.

3.      3.  Water damage – Low areas of the property and the odd “duck ponds” were underwater for weeks.  While we did squeegee off water whenever possible, the turf in these areas just suffocated and rotted. Many of you commented in the days leading up to the tournament how the smell of rot pervaded the property.  If it was near death after the rain stopped, the heat pushed it over the edge.

4.      4.  Poa annua – Our fairways are 50%+ Poa annua.  As I’ve discussed on many occasions, Poa creates a lovely surface, but is a much weaker plant than bentgrass.  Poa is short rooted, more susceptible to disease, and much more prone to “checking out” in hot, humid conditions. 

If there is any upside to the poor fairway conditions, most of the turf lost is Poa annua and not the more desirable bentgrass.  We have been using chemicals in the spring and fall to help the bentgrass “outcompete” the Poa and slowly transition to a higher percentage of bentgrass in the fairways.  Mother Nature has decided to accelerate that process for us.  In the short-term, the normally carpet-like conditions in the fairways is compromised, but in the long-term, it will help us towards our goal of a more vigorous stand of bentgrass and less Poa annua in our fairways.  Many members like to ask me why Inverness is re-grassing the golf course, and our situation is a perfect example why.

The plan for recovery is simple.  Patience, fertilizer, seed, aerification and sod.  We will exhaust our nursery to sod as many completely dead areas as possible.  The small patches that still have bentgrass living in or around them will be given extra fertilizer and water to encourage growth.  Areas that are mostly just “thinned” will be scarified and seeded with bentgrass.  We want to encourage as much bentgrass growth as possible before the fall comes and the Poa annua will germinate naturally from our soil seed bank.  To help things along, we will begin deep-tine aerifying our fairways in August to get some much needed oxygen into the soil and relieve the extra compaction from all the traffic and wetness.

Overall, this really was a “perfect storm”.  All of the above pressures combined into one week of really bad growing conditions.  With a little time and a lot of effort, we will come out better and stronger for the future.  I thank you for your patience.

Why you never get comfortable in this line of work

As the Marathon Classic enters the second day of its temporary colonization of our golf course, the heat is ON!  90+ degrees and extreme humidity have taken its toll on the golf course.  As I've said many times before, I would rather have no rain than too much rain.  Unfortunately, we have the perfect example of "why" right in front of us now.  Sadly, you will not be returning to quite the same conditions you had when you left.

Just this past Thursday, you will remember the golf course as completely saturated for right on two weeks straight.  Rain on 18 of 19 days prior, the golf course was in rough shape.  Standing water covered the fairways, rough, and even some tees for days.  We had not mowed fairways or tees for what seemed like forever.  Finally, with things letting up, we were beginning to mow again Friday, Saturday, and the heat and humidity set in.

Unfortunately for us, having as much Poa annua in our fairways as we do, this meant trouble.  Saturated, smelly soil practically suffocated turf in low areas and it only took a day of heat for things to start turning bad.  Turf in these areas is thin at least and in many cases gone.  Areas of high cart traffic seemed to take things the worst.  The start of 3 fairway, 7 fairway, 9 fairway and just about anywhere carts usually travel are loaded with Poa annua and really subject to loss.  The worst areas have been in poorly drained rough areas.

This picture is from last week.  As you can see the days and days of saturation was already beginning to take its toll on the turf.

Carts driving through these areas doesn't much help either.  This turf had already been thinned and stressed from carts.

Down in front of 1 green was lost long before tournament week.  Our best efforts to squeegee water off were for naught.

The usual puddles in #8 fairway were there for days, suffocating the turf.

Another area last week beginning to thin and stress out from being innundated.

Finally, we were able to mow Friday.  As you can see, we were actually bailing hay.

Now, more of these areas have begun to "check out" and more or less rot.

Compounding this damage was the fact that the saturation was so profound here that we could not make an effective chemical application to stem disease from harming us farther.  There were some areas of disease present.  Unfortunately, the damage from the water itself was far more prevalant.  As one of my friends put it, just plain ol' "jungle rot".

Now there is some hope for these areas.  They may not be quite as bad as they seem for the long term.  Since we have been able to make a chemical application, it seems there is some growth in many of these areas.  While they are browned out, with a few weeks of favorable conditions these areas can recover.  We will use nursery sod to repair the worst of the areas, but mostly rely on the plants to battle back and refill on their own.

This area has bentgrass remaining and will fill in over time.

Many areas of poor drainage have small blemishes such as this that will recover.  Probably a little disease here but should recover in short order.

In short, Mother Nature rained down on us and punished our weakest areas.  This isn't the first time, and won't be the last.  We will take what we learn from this and try to make things better in the future.

Hope in one hand....

While the golf course was inundated with rain water, we were in the process of completing another round of testing on our new well.  Unfortunately, the results are not what we were hoping for.  While every inch of the golf course was covered with water we didn't want, the water we did want directly beneath the surface was nowhere to be found.

The final results show that the well can sustain around 180 gallons per minute.  Our goal was 350-500 in order to prove sufficient groundwater to directly supply our sprinkler system without the use of a retention pond.  180 gallons would be sufficient to fill a pond (albeit slowly) but as we all know, the undertaking of pond construction is a much more complicated discussion.

There are two things to consider that keep my glass half-full.  First, the results do help us learn more about what our water supply is.  While the least expensive "option A" (digging two wells and directly supplying our lines) may be sliding off the table, we now have a better sense of what direction we need to take.  The goal of the well was to test our aquifer and see what we had.  The "hope" of the well was we had enough water to just hook it into our pipes and get on with life and go build bunkers.  Our hopes are somewhat dashed, but we now know which direction to head and we can set new goals.  Myself, the long-range planning committee, and the board are determined to make a path forward to correct our water issue.

The second thing that keeps my glass half-full is that the drawing board still has some ideas left on it.  There are some technologies available and some other options that may help us find the amount of water we need.  We will continue working to exhaust every option to find the water we want at a reasonable cost.  I haven't given up hope just yet for the "no pond" option.  Stay tuned.  I hope to know more in the next week or two.

If the water just isn't under our feet and the "no pond" option doesn't pan out, at least we will know for sure that the only real correction of our water issue will be a retention pond.  This is not a bad thing in terms of the function of the course, but it will be more costly and require a great deal more planning both logistically and financially.  Until we fix it, I will always believe that the best thing we can do to secure the future of this club (and my ability to maintain it) is get a new, clean, plentiful water source.  

Have a great 4th of July.