So yes, we delayed fairway aeration due to the persistent wet weather. Was that a good decision? You bet! We had perfect weather the last week of April and here's some pictures which show just how well the process went.
Check out the gorgeous sunshine as we're pulling cores around the 18th teeing grounds. Okay I keep calling them fairways but really since our fairways and teeing grounds are all connected it's hard to distinguish between fairway and the other short grass areas like tees and approaches. We treat all the short grass the same and we call all the short grass the "fine turf".
The machine we used to punch the holes is brand new and we just acquired it a few weeks ago. The main reason for getting this new machine is that it simply is amazing compared to other aerifiers. It is super fast and the cores come out of the ground in fragments. Check out this close up of the turf right after this machine has done it's thing.
You can see there is quite a bit of soil brought to the surface. That's really the whole idea. Bringing up soil and then returning it back into the turf canopy is what in turn makes for a healthy stand of turf. Yes punching holes and getting air into the surface is important and yes punching holes for better infiltration of water is nice too, but in my opinion it's the recycling of the soil that is the key here. When soil is recycled there is nutrients and micro organisms that are turned over and this is where the power of nature takes over. For centuries the "turning over" of soil has been known to be important for growing healthy plants. We're getting back to the basics by pulling cores and it's working. Our fine turf is now much healthier and our summer diseases like fairy ring are much more manageable.
After punching the fine turf and letting the surface dry out a little, we drag the areas with a harrow mat. This breaks up the soil and knocks it down into the turf canopy.
In this picture you can see the difference between an area that has been drug with the mat and an area that has not. Pretty cool huh?
The last step is to now pick up that little turf plug which is left behind. It helps to condense them by blowing them into long rows.
This marvelous time saving machine gathers them up and now we're done. Waiting for the good weather, and having the new punching machine made this the most successful fairway aerification I've ever seen. Thank you for your patience. The result is some pretty gorgeous fine turf. Hope you're enjoying it today.
It was just a gorgeous morning today as we started our fall aeration on greens. This picture is showing the sand application to #3 green. Yes it's pretty dusty and that's because we're using dried sand. Normally the sand has some moisture to it and it doesn't look this dusty. While I was standing on the green taking this picture I also took some pictures of the disease popping up on the back of #3 green. Look here.
This disease is called Fusarium Patch and it is very common in the Pacific Northwest on Poa greens. Here's another picture I took this morning of Fusarium Patch, but this was taken on the back of #4 green.
You might be thinking these disease spots are really small and no big deal. That's only true because we noticed this disease coming on early last week when the weather cooled down and so we immediately applied a plant protection product to stop the infection. If we had not made that application, there would be significant turf loss in these areas. So why do these areas have disease popping up and other areas do not? That's pretty simple and I'm sure you can tell by looking at these pictures that these areas are surrounded by trees. No, I'm not saying trees cause disease. It's always disease pathogens that cause disease, but a plants natural defense mechanism cannot work well when the plant suffers from shade. Trees cause the shade which weakens the plant and then the plant becomes susceptible to disease. In addition, trees restrict air flow and that makes the environment in these shady areas more conducive to disease. So now you have grass plants weakened from shade living in an environment that has more disease pressure. To make things worse, if you loose turf to disease in these areas, it takes forever for the turf to recover since the turf in these areas are weekend by the shade. It's the perfect storm really. Shade is an absolute killer on a golf course. Selectively removing trees is the most logical solution since it will both improve the environment and improve the plants health.
Right now there are 36 trees on the golf course that are marked with orange ribbon because they are scheduled to be removed this off-season per the Club's Tree Management Plan. Some of these trees are being removed because they compete for sunlight and are compromising the quality of the golf course. Some of these trees are being removed because they are simply in the way of golf and so they also are compromising the quality of the golf course. If you would like more information on the reasons surrounding the removal of these trees, click HERE to download this years project summary. By the way, disease incidence is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the true cost of trees. For a realistic picture of what a tree really costs, this article is always a good read, click HERE.
This is a picture of the 6th hole taken last summer. I took it early in the morning when there was a good amount of dew because you can clearly see by the dew pattern that we had some serious pitting of the turf caused by disease. This next picture is a close up of one of the most infected areas and you can see that I removed a sample of turf. That sample was sent to a diagnostic lab and the test results showed that we were fighting a serious outbreak of fairy ring and waitea patch.
Now this is when I'm supposed to show you a picture of the golf course today and of course our turf today should be disease free because of what we learned last year. Well this is a picture of some of our fine turf today.
Here's another picture of some of our fine turf today.
And here's another.
So again we have disease. Again I sent samples to the lab and this time there is no waitea patch, only fairy ring. So things are better but certainly not great. In fact I started writing this post a couple months ago because I was going to show just how great things are today due to the timing of a preventative fungicide application to the fine turf. We did everything we were supposed to do. We monitored soil temperature and applied a preventative fungicide twice this past spring and things were definitely looking good through May and into early June. The preventative applications work best when applied at the right time based on soil temperature and we feel like we "nailed it" in regard to timing. After all, timing is everything right? Well, some hot, dry weather hit us in June and we started to see the disease pop up. Some of it got so advanced that we started to loose turf. Needless to say my team and I are very frustrated with the persistence of the fairy ring. Spraying more fungicide is not something we want to do and it's not something we can afford to do. We have spot treated some of the worst areas with additional fungicide but it would cost about $9,000 to spray all the fine turf areas. The operating budget can not accommodate an application like that and even if it could, there is no guarantee that another application will solve the problem. So where do we go from here? I can sum it up in one word.........cultivation.
This is what I mean by cultivation. You might say this looks like aerification and of course it is. So why am I calling it cultivation? Let me explain. Aerification is the process of punching a hole in the ground. This increases gas exchange. It also provides a cavity which can be filled with sand or some other type of amendment in order to modify the soil profile. If you punch a hole with a hollow tine, some of the soil and thatch is removed during the process. But, there's more to it than that. When you punch a hole with a hollow tine, soil is brought to the surface and this is what I want to emphasize. When soil is brought to the surface, inevitably some of it is left behind and then gets incorporated back into the turf. When soil is removed and returned it is basically tilling which can be referred to as cultivation. So how does cultivation solve our fairy ring problem? To best understand it I encourage you to go online and type "fairy ring control" into any search engine and read up on it. I'm certain you will find a lot of information and many of the articles will say the same thing. You'll read that fairy ring is common and becoming more common as we try to reduce inputs into the turf system. Fairy ring favors a lean, dry condition and all of us are trying to reduce our fertilizer use and water less. You'll also read that fairy ring is one of the number one "hardest" diseases to control. You might also read that fungicides have been very ineffective at controlling the disease. If you read an article published by a chemical company, you will probably read that their fungicide does control fairy ring. One things for sure, no matter how many different articles you read about fairy ring, all of them will say that aerification is one of the ways to alleviate the symptoms. Well we aerify the fine turf twice a year and some areas are aerified 3 times annually. Why then are we still seeing fairy ring? I believe it's because we are only aerifying, and NOT cultivating. We've been using solid tines for the past 5 years and solid tines punch nice clean holes without bringing up any soil to the surface. When turf is cultivated using hollow tines, the soil gets turned over and mixed together. When soils are mixed together, the fairy ring fungi are mixed together and they cancel each other out. Fairy ring fungi produce compounds that are antagonistic to other fairy ring fungi. So to sum it up, we are going back to hollow tine aerification and we are going to try as much as possible to break up the aerification cores and return the soil back into the turf system. As much as this will antagonize the fungi, I know it will also antagonize the golfer. For this I am sorry but we had a good run with the solid tine aerification. We proved that you don't have to punch with hollow tines to manage organic matter. Unfortunately mother nature again has revealed its complexity and now it's time to go back to the basics and let nature work it's magic. I imagine after a season or two we can go back to periodically punching with solids without any serious consequences. Want more info on fairy ring? click HERE, or HERE, and HERE
