Weather and Irrigation

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

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.

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.

My Philosophy of Golf Course Maintenance

The best place to start on anything is at the beginning. When I was first hired at LedgeRock, Mr Styer asked me to come up with my Philosophy of Golf Course Maintenance, which somewhat doubled as our standards of maintenance. He used it to show prospective members what LedgeRock was about and what was planned for the course conditioning. Revisiting it 8 years later and the fundamentals are still the same, although improved on in some cases.

While that was written mainly as a marketing tool it did represent the standard we expected the course to be maintained and the proof is what you see during the summer so this post is more to provide information of some of the maintenance practices that occur throughout the year and why I do things certain ways. I will cover each of these in more detail later, so in order to keep readers from falling asleep, a summary of each will suffice for now.

One of the items that was decided on very early was the playability of the course was priority and it should play hard and fast. That meant a little brown turf is tolerated provided the players get good ball roll and the course plays fun, especially considering how tough it can be, every yard counts! We can control how much water we put down but unfortunately have no control over mother nature’s input so this item is very had to keep consistent when she plays her hand. Just remember brown turf isn’t a bad thing.

Next for playability is how the greens play; I manage our greens without growth regulators (which is rare these days) and to do so requires that the crew pay a lot of attention to them to have them run at the speeds they do. By doing this they sometimes look a little thin especially when the (black) algae appears but this is nothing to worry about provided they remain to putt extremely true and smooth, their playability is my biggest concern. I’ll explain later in detail in another post why I manage them this way.

Soil/plant health: When I started as a superintendent I relied on the old mantra of feed the soil and everything else will fall into place. Being a new construction and having moved a lot of soil in the process, they definitely needed some work but I soon realized I was running in circles as when one nutrient would be in balance it knocked another out…… Once they were in decent shape (a nice average) I just started concentrating on the surface which let’s face it is all golfers are really concerned about!!! Since then I haven’t looked back and the turf is healthy and can do  pretty much anything that is asked of it.

General aesthetics: The big one to most people – the visual aesthetic when you drive in, walk up on a tee box etc. I believe that everything should be as perfect as possible at all times, especially the items that attract the eye and try to ensure that as many details as possible are taken care of. There are always more items that can be done but it would take unlimited resources so I have to work within the budget to ensure that they are kept to a minimum. Sometimes I do miss little things and am appreciative of when members let me know and in a few instances where we know about it but can’t address for some reason or another I can let them know it is on my list.

Our maintenance budget is very good to provide and exceed the required standards. It should be noted that no two golf courses are the same so comparing budgets – while a good indicator of general costs – the details need to be looked into. LedgeRock is a very difficult course to look after with large areas that require handwork which in turn costs more to maintain than a course without them. I search for better ways to do things and save as much money as possible ensuring I can do more with the budget that’s provided and get to items that may previously be overlooked.

Over time I’ll detail these items in more detail, but to sum up my general philosophy is to provide the members with first class conditions with playability taking priority. 

The First Post!!

Welcome to the maintenance blog for LedgeRock Golf Club. I tossed the idea of starting one around a number of times in the past to find the best method to communicate what is going on around the course and why I do things the way I do. I kept arriving back at a blog being the best method but I wanted to make sure I would have the time to keep it current and updated regularly. I also wanted the ability to post from the field rather than make notes and then have to come in to post it. Twitter and Facebook seemed like ok options but I find Twitter fussy and FB more of a social platform. The newsletter worked as a nice way to highlight items, although it was more of a ‘heads-up’ than a timely continual update. The blast emails worked well whenever there has been an issue that necessitated immediate notification.

With the creation of the Golf Advisory Panel (GAP) this past fall, I decided to revisit the blog idea since most of the topics & concerns and subsequent discussions were items that had been looked at before by myself or the board at one time or another. Now that the membership has grown the older methods are no longer as useful as they have been so the best way to bridge the lack knowledge of what we do on the course and why I do certain things certain ways is to have it easily accessible.  Although I had started the blog page a year or so ago (although not adding any content), coming back to it revealed that Google actually has been at work, making it a more friendly platform and now I can text updates to it, so it covers the aspects of what I was looking for.

As I get going, I plan to provide insights to how I maintain the course and why I do things that seem different or annoying!! I’m going to apologize upfront if I ramble on as I tend to get excited talking about what we do here (ok so I can be a turf-nerd!!). Along with these longer more detailed updates, my plan is to post short updates regularly as I see things in the field that I feel warrant attention and then I can elaborate as needed later.  Finally if anyone has a question on a post, anything I’m doing, not doing, a topic you have a question on or anything else related to the course or its maintenance just send me an email alan@ledgerockgolf.com