Course Update - May 28, 2018

Irving Park Greens Aerification

The Irving Park course  will be aerified on Monday, June 4 and Tuesday, June 5.  With the Farm course closed this will be extra burdensome on the members but the aerifcation of the greens prior to the onset of the hot and humid summer season is critical to the survivability of the Bentgrass.   Through aerification we; 1) extract excessive accumulation of organic material; 2) improve soil gas exchange; 3) stimulate new root development; 4) stimulate microbial activity; and 5) improve the plants ability to withstand biotic and abiotic stresses.




Ultradwarf Sprigs
The Farm course officially closed on Sunday, May 20th to begin preparing the greens for the planting of the new G12 Ultradwarf sprigs.  The first step was to spray a growth regulator on the parts of the greens where there was live grass growing in an effort to slow the growth of these areas over the next several weeks.  The greens were then vertically mowed and scalped to remove as much of the surface material as possible.  Behind the verticutting and scalping came the aerifiers.  The greens were aerified three times over with 3/8 inch coring tines.  The plugs were allowed to dry out and were then dragged and blown off.  The final step was to heavily topdress the greens and roll them.

A Green Verticut, Scalped and Aerified

A Green Topdressed and Ready for Planting

The preparation of the greens was completed on Wednesday 5/23 and the new sprigs arrived around midnight in a refrigerator truck.  The truck's temperature was set at 35 degrees inside the trailer to prevent the sprigs heating up and decaying throughout their long trip from Texas.  The sprigs were planted on 13 greens on Thursday 5/24 and the remaining 8 greens were planted on Friday 5/25.  Once the sprigs were spread across the green they were rolled and heavily watered.  For the next 10 days the sprigs will be watered constantly throughout the daylight hours.

Laying out the Bags

A Closeup of Newly Planted Sprigs

#11 Green 5/27

In the early stages of sprigging a green the new plants are very vulnerable to two things.  The first is drying out.  To keep the plants alive until they begin to form a new root system you basically have to keep them wet 24/7.  Throughout the first two weeks the greens will receive nearly 4 inches of water every day.  Once the stolons begin to establish new roots the watering levels will be slowly backed down until around day 28 when we will go back to night watering.

The second and most concerning vulnerability in the early stages of planting is a large scale downpour, that if it were to occur, would wash all the sprigs from the low areas to drainage areas off the greens.  If this were to happen the crew would have to go out as soon as possible and attempt to rake the sprigs up and respreads them across the green.  In certain cases we would ask Champion to send additional sprigs to replant these areas and start the watering cycle all over again.  This high risk period last from the day of planting for approximately 10 days.  So we may need a little luck as we have Subtropical Storm Alberto creating flood warnings across our area throughout the early part of this week.

Once the greens begin rooting we will begin the second phase of the program, which includes mowing, verticutting, aerifying, topdressing and fertilizing.  This phase usually occurs right around the 2.5-3 week mark and will continue until the course is ready for play in what we estimate will be 7-9 weeks (mid to late July).

SOD UPDATE

The Irving Park course has been working on sod repairs steadily over the past several weeks. To date they have installed nearly 30,000 sf of new turf with another truckload scheduled for delivery this Thursday.  The early priorities were placed on areas around the greens and on the tees.  Once these areas are complete the staff will begin to move to fairways.  The Zoysia fairway on 14 is the slowest to establish and therefore will be done first.  The largest amount of damage is on the #7 fairway and it will be done last to allow for as much natural recovery as possible.  Once the fairways are complete we will begin to move to the final areas of damage mostly in the rough scattered throughout the course.

Prepping for Sod

A weeks worth of Dead Sod removed from the Course

 The Farm course had to detour from sod repairs over the last two weeks in an effort to prepare for and plant the greens.  With the greens now planted the staff has already reinitiated its work of repairing the numerous winterkilled areas.  We hope to have the vast majority of these repairs on the Farm course completed by the time the course is reopened.

Golf Course Update on Winterkill and Pond Dredging Project #13 Irving Park Course

Greensboro Country Club President, Thomas Watkins, recently sent out an email to the membership briefly outlining the scale of the damage that has been inflicted on the two courses from this past winter's cold spell.  While most people now recognize how cold this past January was the months of March and April were also well below average in temperatures.  While we knew early on we had a fair amount of damage on the tees, fairways and roughs, we struggled to quantity just how much until we received a week or more of warm seasonal temperatures that seemingly took forever to get here.  In a typical year the two courses are fully green from tree line to tree line by the end of April.  This year we estimate that we are approximately two -three growing weeks behind a normal year.  While we spent a lot of time probing areas to try and determine just what we would be facing it is an almost impossible task to accurately forecast these damaged areas until Mother Nature takes her course and clearly defines them for you.

Early Stages of Winterkill Definition IP #7 2018

Winterkill #7 Fairway 2015

Now that these areas have somewhat defined themselves we know we have about 5 acres of damaged turf between the two courses that will need to be repaired.  To repair these areas the staff will be asked to use a sod cutter to cut off the top layer of dead turf.  Then they will need to hand shovel the dead material into a utility vehicle and prepare the surface for new sod.  Once approximately 10,000 square feet of turf area has been prepared the crew will work to install the sod, begin the new establishment phase and move onto the next 10,000 sf plot.  While this sounds simple enough it is a very laborious process that will take time to accomplish.  We expect to average 1 truckload a week for the next 12 weeks, therefore we hope to have this work behind us by the latter part of July.  We will try to focus on the most important playing areas up front and work our way to the lesser important areas last.  Throughout this same time period we will be actively fertilizing and aerifying the damaged areas to promote as much recovery along the edges as possible.  With warm weather during the month of June we expect to see a measurable percentage of these areas shrink in size on their own.  With that taken into consideration, we hope to have a very presentable course by the latter part of June.

Removing the Winterkilled Turf

While we now recognize just how cold this past winter was it is best represented by looking at how much damage we had to our Zoysiagrass on the Farm course this year.  Zoysia is significantly more cold tolerant than Bermudagrass, but its cold tolerance was fully tested this year with several areas failing the test.  We are currently estimating we lost 22,000 sf of Zoysia this year in comparison to the brutal winterkill year of 2015 where we lost ~ 2,000 sf.

Zoysia Damage Farm Course #7

Pond Dredging Project Irving Park Hole #13

We recently drained the pond on the Irving Park course in an effort to remove the small island that had formed over the past many years from upstream sediment and debris buildup.  The pond has become an aesthetic eyesore with the noticeable island of debris and the overall shallow nature of the pond that makes it very difficult to maintain any semblance of an acceptable level of water quality.  We had hoped to use some small turf friendly excavation equipment in an effort to get the debris well below the surface in an effort to return a full surface of water back across the pond.  This was meant to be a temporary fix until the club could work a full scale pond reclamation project into its long term capital planning.  Once the pond was fully drained and the extent of buildup could be more clearly seen it quickly became apparent that in order to accomplish the original task of limited debris removal it would require much larger equipment and would therefore need to be rescheduled.  We are currently working on revising our estimates for this project and will be submitting the new proposal for Board reconsideration.  In the meantime the pond will be allowed to refill and due to the shallow nature of the pond and its small size we predict the moderate rains forecasted for this weekend will quickly refill the pond.  If not we will refill manually with wells located in close proximity to the pond. We currently hope we can restart working on and finish this project by early summer.

#13 Pond in a Drained State