It’s a Bird. No, it’s a Plane…
…Nope, it was rain!
Wow! What an amazing
difference rain can have on a golf course.
We received 1.41 inches of rain on August 16th. That was the largest rainfall here at the
golf course during the growing season in the last year. Hard to believe, right? We managed to survive 50 straight days
without a rainfall that eclipsed more than .05 inches. To make circumstances worse, July was the
hottest ever recorded. 26 of 31 days
surpassed 90 degrees, and 8 of those days broke 100. July 7th marked our hottest day of
the year at 108 degrees. This officially
makes 3 very difficult grass growing years in a row, and the last 2 years don’t
hold a candle to this year. This being
said, we have a few areas to recover. It
is only August 20th, and our best recovery days are ahead. The plan on filling in our weaker areas is to
continue promoting the growth of the bentgrass.
I think we can close the gap in many areas by fertilizing fairways and
slowing the Poa by continuing spraying Velocity. I anticipate doing a little seeding and
patching in some other areas with bentgrass sod from our nursery. The good news is we have plenty of seed left
from last year and I only project a half day’s worth of seeding compared to the
week of sun-up to sun-down seeding we did last September.
Rainfall totals recorded at
DCC this year:
Jan - 4.2” Apr - 1.80” July – 0.14”
Feb - 0.49” May – 1.75”
March – 1.71” June – 1.05”
I
would like to ease a few minds about the Velocity before we get too far away
from the subject. In no way did Velocity
cause the bad areas we currently have in our fairways. Lack of rain and irrigation, heat, and
disease were the root of all our problems.
Our May and June applications of Velocity increased our percentage of
bentgrass more than I ever imagined and I believe our “bad areas” would have
been much worse if there was more Poa. Our
best estimation in early spring was that we had maybe 40 percent bentgrass and
60 percent Poa. Now we estimate having
70 percent bentgrass and 30 percent Poa.
If all goes according to plan, we should continue increasing our
percentage of bentgrass over the next couple months.
#1 in August of 2011
#1 one year later
