Only 18 days left in the year!!!

Although I can't say for everyone that this year flew by, I feel like I don't recollect anything from this summer.  Maybe it was due to the feeling of never being done with anything; maybe it was due to the fact that we were still moving snow off Wildflower's greens May 1st. Looking back on the year, I am so glad I keep a daily log book of what went on every day.
     One of the biggest advantages that I personally think every superintendent should do is keep a very detailed daily journal of happenings on the course and weather. Now, I'm sure the majority of superintendents do this is some form, but I also think it's a great learning device for assistant superintendents out of college. I was introduced to this by my former superintendent Rex Saddoris at Lake Powell National.  My first day, Rex handed me a 5-subject notebook and told me I had to keep track of everything that we do during the day.  When he told me this I really wanted to say no, and that it would take up way too much of my time trying to remember and write out everything that we did.  Looking back on it, it was maybe the most beneficial task I was assigned my entire career. Being able to look back and see what was happening on the course from year to year is invaluable and provides the superintendent with historical data (albeit not quantitative) but nonetheless extremely important.  Learning from your mistakes is a whole lot easier when you have them written down and you can flip back to the exact date when you made the mistake and think it through given the outcome.  I can't stress enough how valuable being able to look back in time and see what worked and what didn't.  History doesn't repeat itself, and every situation is different, but being able to relate past experiences to the task at hand will make the outcome lean more in your favor. 

Ahh...Fall pt. 2

My last post lead into what it really takes to "put a course to sleep for the winter".  In this post, I'll shed some light on what we do to put a golf course to bed for the winter.  I'm assuming that some of you out there understand that there is a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure that the grass will come back healthy and vibrant once the snow is gone.  I am going to outline the basic needs of winterization, and try not to be sooooo long winded as to lose your attention.

Ahhhhh...Fall pt.1

 

 

Fall is my absolute favorite time of the year.  Spring is pretty neat, but you always can count on some nasty cold, rainy days which remind you of the not too far out-of-mind winter that you just came out of hibernation from.  Fall brings a welcomed drop in the heat, not only to us humans, but to the turf we hold so close to our hearts.  Cool season grasses are aptly named just that- they grow best in the cooler, shoulder-seasons of the summer.  The turf has mainly rebounded from the various summer stresses, and you don't have that "it's so bright it hurts my eyes" sun beating down on you.  You can actually enjoy being out in the sun and your face doesn't hurt from all the squinting. 
      Another great thing about fall is around the course, there is more time to get those projects done that have been nagging you all summer. 






     Here at Wildflower, we had an "interesting" pressurization, to say the least.  Two major breaks isolating loops in our system that were altogether, around 400 feet.  It was so convenient that BOTH of the breaks happened to be under cart paths, so I decided this spring to isolate them and come back to them at a later date.
   This is the beginning stages of our 250' irrigation re-build.  I can't say for sure that all of the 250' of pipe looked like this guy here, but I do know that we dug up just by the gate valve by the cart path and it was shattered right up to the cart path.  On the other side, towards 15, we dug a trench 40 feet long and all of that pipe met the same fate, completely shattered pipe with razor sharp edges. 

As you can see, it did go RIGHT under the cart path by 16 Tee box, so we rented a Demo saw and a ditch witch.  With a little planning, we were able to knock out both fixes in a day.  Today was mainly spent gluing the pipe together and working on the angles to make the pipe fit just right.

 With the last few days being in the 70's, there has been a decent amount of golf and we really appreciate your patronage.  This time of the year is always tough to make decisions because you are basing your reason for the decision on the weather.  We could be buried under 2 feet of snow by tomorrow; you just never know.  There are a lot of things that we need to still get done here at Wildflower in order to keep us ahead of the game in the spring, mostly being leaf removal and fungicide applications.  The difficult decision to close the course is always being asked and we will stay open as long as we can.  I feel we owe it to our members who lost the better half of the spring to inclement weather, but if the weather is going to change here soon, I don't think too many of us will be knocking down the door to go out and play in 40 degree weather that's super windy.  I'm going to wrap this post up, but it leads right into my next post...

 

 

 

Aerification... Taking one step back to take two steps forward

     Some of you out there may wonder why golf courses seem to always be destroying their greens, tees, and sometimes fairways.  I'v heard it a million times, "You just got the greens looking wonderful and then you go out and punch a bunch of huge holes and throw down way too much sand and it ruins them!!!"  Rest assured golf course superintendents (and myself included) all want their golf course to play perfect each and every day for a long time to come.  It is that exact reason that we aerate; we want the playing conditions to constantly improve.  Sometimes you have to take one step back to move forward to reach your goal. 

 

This is the main reason that we aerate a few times each year...

     You can see the different striations just under the grass.  See that darker brown layer just under the grass?   That is the main reason that the tee boxes at Wildflower golf course took such a hit when it finally decided to warm up this year.  With that much thatch, it is inevitable that your grass is going to become a weak stand sooner than later.  This cut was from #6 Main tee box, and if you've golfed out at Wildflower, you probably noticed how dry #6 looked. 

      These are the main reasons to alleviate thatch in grass:

        1)  When thatch dries out, it becomes HYDROPHOBIC. hydro=water   phobic= repels

        2)  Thatch that stays wet is a perfect breeding ground for fungi

        3)  Excessive thatch can lead to scalping and "puffy" stands of turf

        4)  Elevated levels of thatch actually take the crown (the actively growing part of the plant) up off the soil profile and can lead to pulling out of the crowns and actually rooting just in the thatch.  This problem leads to turf that is easily damaged by mowing, walking and divots taken by normal golf. 

         There are many more reasons to hate thatch, but you do need a small amount (usually around .25 inches) for a healthy stand of grass.  Thatch, although mostly talked about in a negative way, buffers the crowns from temperature extremes and when thatch is broken down on a microbial scale, it adds much needed food for the surrounding plants.  Thatch gets detrimental when it is allowed to build up past the range of normal acceptance. 

       When were talking about thatch becoming hydrophobic, I mean it literally is scared of water.  No matter how much you pour onto the grass, it won't work into the soil because the thatch is so tight and becomes water repellent when it dries out.  Look up professor Larry Stowell, PACE Turf... This guy is amazing!!!!  He has a pretty good YouTube video on why us superintendents aerate.  The use of wetting agents will help alleviate some of the hydrophobicity of the thatch, but if you don't want to add more chemicals to your grass, the only option is aeration.

      The very basis of aerification is simple,  you punch a hole in the ground, fill it with sand, and the magic starts.  Usually taking what's called a "core" from the turf opens up the root zone to let much needed oxygen, water and growing media (sand) into the holes left from pulling the core out of the ground.  This mix of porous sand mixing into the usually organic-matter rich soil also aids the microbes in breaking down even more thatch.  Microbes need oxygen to do their job, just like we all do to survive.  Without oxygen, or in an anaerobic state, means that the microbes aren't doing their job, and then the thatch starts to build up once again.  This is the major reason that we have to continually disturb the soil profile to add oxygen to aid the microbes in breaking down the organic matter.  Another benefit of pulling out cores and filling the holes with sand is that grass roots will take the path of least resistance in search of water and nutrients.  Imagine trying to stick a pencil into compacted clay and good black dirt.  Wouldn't you think that it would be easier to stick that same pencil into sand, and wouldn't that same pencil go deeper and require less work to get deeper?  Now, I know most of us can push a little harder on the pencil than the grass roots can, but aerification holes provide the grass with an easy route down to find more water and more nutrients. 

 

   The grass will fill in, the sand will work it's way into the thatch layer, and the grass will be healthier for all the work we do to destory a beautifully rolling green.

    As I'm writing this, we are finishing up punching the back 9 tees at Wildflower.  Greens will be aerated later this summer, and I look forward to hearing all the complaints of the golfers who didn't get a chance to read my lecture on why I do what I do!!!  We're not the only golf course that aerifies, and I'm certain that my crew loathes the job board when it says aerification just as much as golfers!

 

Keep Hacking-

  Aaron

 

PS-  I welcome comments/complaints!  Please feel free to leave a comment and Ill do my best to get back to you in a timely manner on here!

 

     

Summer is half over...

Hey all:
     Sorry for such a lapse in posts, we here at Wildflower have been extremely busy since we hit the ground running when we opened.  I am finally getting back in the office and getting things organized for the later half of the summer.  We had a great fourth at the course, with Friday's totals being well over 300 rounds played.  I want to thank you all for coming out and enjoying Wildflower.  Some things that we will be doing/ have been doing in the past few weeks:
     - you may have noticed that #3 green took quite a few steps back and in a hurry.  Last Sunday when we mowed in the morning, there was some LDS (Localized Dry Spot) on #3 and the PG.  When I came back around 3 pm, #3 had taken a huge turn for the worse.  Sorry for my lack of photos, but it's something that I'm not overly proud of.  Monday morning came around after a worried and sleepless night and I decided to go out and spray all 20 greens with what is called a soil surfactant.  At around 16 oz per acre, a little goes a long ways.  I often like to use the phrase : with golf course management, your dealing with thousandths of an inch and ounces per acre."  For those of you out there that don't realize that this is a blend of science and feel,  I encourage you to "read-up" on some of the golf course industry's many publications and blogs!!!
     A week later and #3 is slowly returning back to it's original shape, even thought we raised the HOC back to .155 to deal with some of the high temps and high humidity that was stressing the plants. 
    -  With the addition of the soil surfactant to the greens, we also sprayed all fairways and tees to combat the same problem that #3 green was having.  You may notice on many of the Tee boxes, that there are some severely dry areas.  When the thatch layer ( below the blades and crown of the plant) has the chance to dry out and you have an excessive amount of thatch, there is a tendency of that thatch to become HYDROPHOBIC- which means it is afraid of water.  Any irrigation you try to dump to it just simply runs off to a lower area and doesn't get the chance to work it's way into the soil where it is needed the most.  Our soil surfactant (Dispatch from Aquatrols) helps to relieve the surface tension of the thatch layer and allows the water to penetrate the soil where it is applied, thus relieving some of the stress of LDS.  Now, this isn't a magic bullet, but simply one of the steps in curing LDS on turf.  There are many studies being done showing the added benefits of applying fungicides to turf to not only combat the fungus, but to also strengthen the plant and aid the plant in relieving summer stress and heat stress.  We will try to get out and spray our tees and fwys with a combination of chlorothalonil and propiconazole, two systemic fungicides which work on a broad spectrum of diseases.  With the high consistent temperatures, the high humidity, and the somewhat lack of wind here in DL, there will inevitably be some Dollar Spot popping up; you may notice this disease on the nursery green approach and on some of the tees. 
     Dollar spot is a disease which loves having the sugars that the grass plants exude combined with the dew from the humidity at night not being taken off.  Dew+sugars+not removing dew=dollar spot.  Now this crude formula doesn't mean that anytime you have dew your going to have dollar spot.
    With my assistant being gone all this week and much of next week, our top priority after the Fourth of July will be maintaining the playing conditions with a little bit of irrigation expansion into areas that don't see any irrigation other than what natural rainfall we do get.    Coming from a golf course which ran around 1.3 to 1.4 million gallons of water each night to a golf course which only irrigates the fwys, greens and tees is quite a shock.  I am used to perfectly green from tee to green, and Wildflower was designed to let the rough go dormant in times of drought.  I know there will be some people out there that say, why waste the water on the rough, but you have to understand what a golf course really does for the environment in terms of being a filter for runoff and for the water that runs into our aquifers, lakes and streams.  I'm not overly-environmentally conscious, but every golf course superintendent has it on their agenda to reduce their chemical inputs, reduce their water usage, and overall make the landscape a more enjoyable place each and every day. 
     Our goal is not to expand the irrigation system to accommodate the 100+ acres and all the rough and prairie, but simply to expand the system to help some of the high traffic areas on the course.  There are many areas which receive no irrigation yet are extremely high traffic areas and you can see the consequences of cart traffic on these areas already.  Please accept our apologies for trenching this week, we are only trying to improve the golf course for years to come!!!
   Also- a special thanks to Jerry Johnson for coming out and trapping our little Caddyshack gophers... I think Mr. Johnson snared around 7 pocket gophers, the mnost famous being the gopher on 18 fwy.
   MUCH THANKS MR. JOHNSON!!!!!!

Gray Snow Mold

 DISCLAIMER:  I am not a plant pathologist!
      As you can see in these pictures, coming out of this record-setting winter we most likely will be dealing with a lot of snow mold issues.  Most snow mold preventative applications will last you 120 days or right around that magic number.  With this extended snow season, we are gearing up and ready for the advanced snow mold presence on the course.  I anticipate a lot of my time this spring will be spent tank-mixing and spraying diseased areas.  Lets say you sprayed PCNB and Iprodione around mid October... 120 days from Mid October gets you to mid February, and as we all know, its LATE APRIL and we still have plenty of snow on the ground.  Our attempts at clearing the greens were in vein; not two days after clearing greens and trying to melt the ice on them Mother Nature dealt us a good 6 to 8 inches of heavy snow...


     Even though the right precautions were taken last fall, snow mold is something that we will deal with year in and year out.  I will try and educate and elaborate on what these two diseases are and some of the means of curing the problem.
     There is a major difference in the two diseases.  Gray snow mold is caused by two species of Typhula: T. incarnata and T. ishikariensis. (1)  Pink Snow Mold is caused by Microdochium nivale.  
     For the sake of this  post and me not wanting to get too crazy with details, I will focus primarily on Gray Snow Mold.
      The symptoms of Gray snow mold develop under continuous snow cover of usually more than 60 days, something that we have obviously encountered this year.  As I write this post, it is yet again snowing!!!  Although this is a typical rule, there are always cases where there was not continuous cover and gray snow mold still popped up.
    
     Gray snow mold has sclerotia (black or brownish, naked-eye visible bodies) that survive from year to year.  This is a great way to ID gray snow mold from pink snow mold because pink doesn't have these bodies.  As you can see in the photos, there is a cobweb-like appearance near the edge of the melting snow.  That is referred to as the mycelial mass, something that in these pictures is highly visible, even from a distance.  Usually, snow molds form circles, but can coalesce to take over very large areas.  The ideal growth for gray snow mold is long periods of wet, cool weather on unfrozen ground.  If you get a large amount of snowfall before the grass is able to "harden-off" and freeze the soil, this is another scenario that is favorable to disease development.  Heavy fall applications of Nitrogen with lush growth before the plant hardens-off makes that area susceptible to the disease after the snow melts off.  When you think about it, there is a lot more leaf tissue due to the excessive fertilizing, which makes more areas for these sclerotia to hide and over-winter.  This excess tissue ( not always directly correlated to fertilization in the fall) also leads to more thatch.    Increased height of cut before the snowfall and accumulations of leaves will also harbor the pathogen and increase the amount you will see in the spring. 
     

 
 Notice how some of the spots have joined together to form irregular patches?  This is called coalescing and accounts for why snow molds can take over large areas of turf.

Check out the mycelial mass ( puffy, almost like light snow) that is raised up off the crown of the plant and up on the leaf blades. 

Resources:

(1) http://www.turffiles.ncsu.edu/diseases/Gray_Snow_Mold.aspx

 

Comments and questions or corrections are encouraged!  I am not claiming to be an expert and if there is something that sounds wrong to you, please leave a comment!  I love to learn more about what we are all experiencing and every one's thoughts are welcome.

 

April 19th update

This was just one week ago before the sequence of snow storms that we have received...  Its starting to look like spring is never going to come to Wildflower golf course.

 As you can see, there is a substantial amount of ice buildup under the foot or so of snow that was here on #1 green.  Tolly, my assistant, worked the JD5200 with the Farm King blower while I was walking the perimeters with a walk-behind blower.  The outer edges of the green WERE ( I say this because we have received plenty of snow in the last week) starting to show good signs of melting the ice up off the crown of the turf.  The JD was too heavy to get out to the edges and we feared that it would break through the ice and disrupt the bentgrass underneath. 

     By Wednesday, Tolly and I had cleared #1, #8, #18 and the putting green by the Pro-Shop.  Thursday morning the snow started... And Friday... All the way to yesterday, which was Thursday, April 18th, 2013...  Beth informed me that this has been the longest winter since the 1850's, I'm not clear as to what EXACT year it was, but this record-breaking winter just seems to keep it's grip on our area. 

 

Hope to see you all very soon, the weather is supposed to break and get some days of sunny weather so were looking forward to a good melt and get the golf season under way!
-Aaron

Snow Removal on #1 PG, #1, #8 & #18 Greens

      By this time last year, wildflower golf course was mowing their greens and golfers were chasing after the little white pill...  What a difference a year makes! 
      Monday started out by contemplating whether or not to remove snow from our most covered greens on the course.  After Tolly and I took a walk around and did some digging on the greens, we decided it was time to help Mother Nature along and get our greens uncovered.  Some of you may have passed by the Country Club and saw that they have already uncovered their greens.  Our reason for waiting is simply that we have predominately bentgrass greens and bent can withstand much colder temperatures and survive much longer under ice cover than Poa annua.  I'm not saying that the country club has Poa greens... I'm just saying that is why we decided to wait and uncover at this time. 
     While we decided to uncover greens, this proved to be the easiest task of the day.  Using a walk behind snow blower and the John Deere tractor, we uncovered #1 green and saw that there was well over an inch of solid ice laying under the 20+ inches of snow.
     Tuesday, Tolly brought in his father's Kubota estate tractor (that's what Bob calls them) to help us get into tight spots and take some of the weight off the greens.  This Kubota is an amazing machine, clearing a path from the back side of #1 green down to #8 green seemingly effortlessly and we were able to uncover #8 much faster than #1 the day before.
     Currently, we are uncovering the #1 PG by the pro shop and #18 green.  We have a few cart paths opened up and hope to get up to the driving range shortly so we can start working up there and get the range open before the course. 
     We will check back in later to let you know what were going to do about all the ice we've uncovered...
-Aaron  

Welcome to the "New" Wildflower Golf Course Turfgrass Operations:

     My name is Aaron Johnson and I am now the golf course superintendent at Wildflower Golf Course.  I am new to this whole "Blogging" thing and I will try to update this site as much as we can during the year to let everyone who wants to know what were doing out on the course. 
     First, I would like to share with you a little background information about myself:
     I started my golf course maintenance career at Cuyuna County Club in Deerwood, Minnesota while in high school.  Working there three summers taught me that running and operating a golf course isn't just mowing an over sized lawn like I'm sure many people believe. The time commitment that it takes to successfully run an established golf course is no small task and it takes many devoted employees all sharing a common goal to make that operation a success.
     After high school, I enrolled in the architectural program at NDSU and soon found myself leaning toward the landscape architecture program.  I learned of the Sports and Urban Turfgrass Management program my sophomore year and changed my major promptly after learning of the Major.  While attending NDSU, I was the assistant superintendent for a newly designed golf course in south Fargo named Osgood Golf Course.  I worked there under Victor Heitkamp for seven years and learned a great deal of what it takes to become a golf course superintendent. 
     In 2011, my wife, my daughter and I moved to Page, Arizona where I was the assistant superintendent at Lake Powell National Golf Course.  My time there was spent honing my skills on irrigation repair and management of cool-season grasses in an arid southwest climate.  In July of 2012 I became the Golf Course Superintendent and applied the knowledge that Rex Saddoris, the former Golf Course Superintendent, had taught me. 
     On February 25th, 2013 I became the head golf course Superintendent of Wildflower Golf Course here in Detroit Lakes.  I, along with the management team here at Fair Hills and Five Lakes Resort, are very optimistic about the future of Wildflower Golf Course.  Moving forward, I believe that we can make Wildflower Golf Course a beautiful destination for many years to come.  I am looking forward to this year and anticipate a great summer maintaining and improving the golf course.
     Please feel free to comment and email me any questions that you may have.  I can be reached anytime on the golf course or in my office and at aaron@wildflowergolfcourse.com
  Here's to a great season after a long winter!!!
-Aaron