A large part of my life is
consumed by the weather and how it affects my day-day decisions. My wife thinks
I’m obsessed with it as I check it so much! At LedgeRock we subscribe to
a weather service along with the regular internet based information. The weather
service provides reliable long range while the radars etc are best at letting
you know what’s coming short term. It plays such as large part as it
controls when I can get work done on the course, depending on what is coming,
disease pressure can be monitored and applications can be made/prepared
for/held off as needed and of course the general stress to the turf, especially
during the summer months.
Watching the forecast lets me know when to water. If I see that rain is imminent I will make the previous watering last a little longer to make sure we don’t overwater, similarly long range forecasts help timing irrigation cycles to run out when it rains. The greens here are USGA spec which is a perched water table system. This means that they drain freely but also can keep a reserve of water in them. It is essential they are maintained properly and water management is key. They require deep soaking and then let dry out to have them work optimally. My assistants use a moisture meter toward the end of the drying cycle to know when to water. We are able to tell where the dry spots are before they appear so can handwater them a little more in the morning to get them through the day. Once the greens start to uniformally dry out I will irrigate them again to re-initiate the cycle.
A number of the greens also have sensors built into them that provide salinity, moisture and temperature. Since they don’t move they only provide a snapshot but are a useful tool in that they can alert me to an issue before I would normally see it. The temperature function has become very useful also to know when the growth is shutting down or starting up which means I know when to start and stop fertilizing them etc which saves money and also helps make agronomic decisions easier as I know when the plant is actively growing. Here are a couple of articles about how they have been helpful at LedgeRock:
Golfdom Feb 2012
Watching the forecast lets me know when to water. If I see that rain is imminent I will make the previous watering last a little longer to make sure we don’t overwater, similarly long range forecasts help timing irrigation cycles to run out when it rains. The greens here are USGA spec which is a perched water table system. This means that they drain freely but also can keep a reserve of water in them. It is essential they are maintained properly and water management is key. They require deep soaking and then let dry out to have them work optimally. My assistants use a moisture meter toward the end of the drying cycle to know when to water. We are able to tell where the dry spots are before they appear so can handwater them a little more in the morning to get them through the day. Once the greens start to uniformally dry out I will irrigate them again to re-initiate the cycle.
A number of the greens also have sensors built into them that provide salinity, moisture and temperature. Since they don’t move they only provide a snapshot but are a useful tool in that they can alert me to an issue before I would normally see it. The temperature function has become very useful also to know when the growth is shutting down or starting up which means I know when to start and stop fertilizing them etc which saves money and also helps make agronomic decisions easier as I know when the plant is actively growing. Here are a couple of articles about how they have been helpful at LedgeRock:
Golfdom Feb 2012
Superintendent Magazine Nov 2012
Here is a graph from the Toro Turfguard sensors showing the temperature, moisture and salinity for July 2012. (Note the moisture is not percentage moisture in the soil, it is the percentage of a user preset minimum). Salinity is not much of an issue at LedgeRock however it is interesting to see it spike once in a while after a high salt content fertilizer is applied.
Here is a graph from the Toro Turfguard sensors showing the temperature, moisture and salinity for July 2012. (Note the moisture is not percentage moisture in the soil, it is the percentage of a user preset minimum). Salinity is not much of an issue at LedgeRock however it is interesting to see it spike once in a while after a high salt content fertilizer is applied.
This is a sensor being installed
The fairways and roughs are native soils so are managed differently. The soils here are ok but in most areas are hard to re-wet once they dry out. I use wetting agents to help make them take water better so during the summer months I can let them dry out. I find it a lot better for the plant to shut down and go dormant (ie brown) than try and make it stay green and this battle eventually has it give up and die…… The last really dry summer was 2010 and all our turf that browned out, came back after the first rain – we did not have to reseed or sod any areas. I certainly would never just turn the water off and let the entire property turn brown as that would be bad also but keeping it alive with minimal water and letting the plants that want to shut down, do so, works really well and the course plays exceptionally well.All this gets thrown out the window in summer like 2011 & 12 when the rains came in August and never let up…… Looking back at our weather station records for 2012 (our station went online in August) you can see just how wet the fall has been. July had been exceptionally dry and the course played extremely well, since then it has had very little chance to dry out.
LedgeRock’s weather station can
be accessed on WeatherUnderground -
it is constantly updated unless we have one of our (frequent) power outages.
When this happens I have to manually update it and restart the auto
updating.Lastly the irrigation system at LedgeRock is the latest available.
Toro were reading the release of their latest controllers and irrigation heads
as LedgeRock was bring built so I was able to get them and ensure the system we
were installing would not be immediately out of date. Since then Toro has
launched a new operating system which is infinitely more user friendly than the
old software and gives us full control over the entire system down to the
second!! Now tweaks to the irrigation cycles can be made in an instant
and ensures that we conserve water and ensure playability does not suffer from
too much water.
