I was reading through the results of our recent member survey today and a couple of the open-ended comments reminded me of one of the annual problems we deal with each and every year. Most notably in the springtime, our greens appear patchy and are often a little bumpy and slow especially in the afternoon hours. Morning golfers will get great putting conditions while I have to listen to the afternoon guys tell me how rotten the greens were. Below is a link to a USGA article explaining this in their "Fore the Golfer" section. I will summarize the article in the next paragraph and then I think I fancy a bit of a "rant".
What is important to remember is that our older greens consist of not only two types of turf - bentgrass and Poa annua - but also many different biotypes within those species. As greens age, environmental pressures, stresses and natural processes segregate into many different strains across a putting surface. All of these strains behave differently throughout the seasons and even the time of day to result in inconsistent conditions that can negatively affect ball roll. In the springtime, all of these different biotypes are coming out of winter with different carbohydrate reserves, seeding rates, growth rates etc and it can be impossible to foresee exactly what to do to get good putting conditions. Everyone comments how their lawns take off in the spring and they can't keep up with the mowing, but somehow if that happens on greens they don't seem to understand. Yes we apply growth regulators religiously to combat that as much as possible, but Mother Nature can ignore those if she choses. As turf managers, the best we can do with Poa annua is keep watching, trying different growth regulator cocktails and react as best we can with cultural practices to make the greens as good as possible day to day.
Now let's begin the rant - Usually, by the end of May into June, these growth patterns tend to steady and seedheads begin to disappear making things much smoother and in turn faster. This is the reason the greens progressively get better and faster right up to the first week of July, which makes people think I just do it for the LPGA (paraphrased from survey comment). I assure you our department does as much as possible within the financial resources and weather provided us to make the course as good as possible each and every day. Do you really think we want the greens bumpy and slow? Do you think I want to listen to the afternoon players moan and complain? Would you deliberately create less than perfect results for your boss if you had the choice to do otherwise? Think about it. Also consider when you go to other courses, the makeup of their greens, the microclimates, the soils, the way they've been maintained for the last 80 years are all different so your comparison of our greens to theirs quite frankly means about jack and squat to me. Trust me - we superintendents are a tight bunch - when we hear how great X's greens are we usually call each other about it and guess what - it's a perception problem that I will likely rant about in a future article. (END OF RANT)
As always this spring, we will try some different things this year to keep improving spring conditions and I hope my rantings and the USGA Green Section article below will be of help to generate a little more understanding.
Cheers!
USGA - Patchy and Bumpy greens - click here
