What this table is showing is temperature first, soil moisture second, total rain fall, max rain fall in any 15 minute window, and solar radiation. The range is from May 1, 2015 through yesterday. You can see the wild variation in all the atmospheric stuff that is important to making a great golf course. First let's look at the temperatures. It's important to remember that temperature is taken in the shade, about 5 feet off the ground. Some days when it's approaching 100 degrees in the shade, inside the turf's canopy in full sun it can be 130-ish. If you look at the first column of numbers, the average temperature, you can see it is starting to trend towards a cooler climate. Duh, right???....Winter is on it's way! You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that one. Rain fall totals in this set are pretty reflective of what the course received, 36+ inches since May.
The most important information in the set for me are the solar radiation numbers , they reflect the recuperative horsepower of the grass. The reason is solar radiation is what drives photosynthesis! One would expect the numbers to trend upwards towards June as the summer solstice was June 21st. These super long, hot days are great for aerifications and heavy rip'n and tearing since the grass gets all the sun it wants to recover. As expected, the number starts trending downward after the summer solstice. The big question is, "How much time do you have before it is too late to get everything done and still recover?" I cant stress enough on how vital it is to get everything done before you loose the grass's ability to recover, which is driven by temperature and solar radiation. I like to see the solar radiation above 200 and the average temperature above 80 degrees when I'm doing my summer time maintenance. This is why I want to be done with all of my aerifications and heavy verti-cutting (the rip'n and tearing) by the end of August. So when someone says, "Why is the Superintendent always beating the golf course up right when the course is starting to get really good again?" The answer is simply that the course needs a certain amount of "maintenance" to meet the ever growing expectation of the membership and it ALL needs to be done while the grass can still recover in time for the Winter Season. It's easy to quantify maintenance time and recuperative capacity when looking at the science behind it.
So what does all this mean when it comes to the course. We all now know the reasoning for the timing, but what else is this data used for? All of this weather information is used to make daily decisions on what is the best balance between how hard do we push the course for playability, while tempering that need with the agronomic needs of the grass. Often times the two are going opposite directions. Take for example the greens. This time of year it is easy to get in real trouble with the greens because of weather if pushed to hard. All of the rain and cloudy days in the last month, combined with the cooling temperatures and shorter days has cut the recuperative capacity about 40%. That means, if I push the greens too hard for playability now which would cause them to thin out due to the water logged soil, excessive heat, and lack of sun, (or even aerified them with big holes)....the greens are going to be "not so good" for a while. To protect the putting surfaces right now it is better to manage them for "good" playing conditions while the weather is adverse to recovery, not manage them for what would be a short lived "great" playing condition. The short lived "great" playing condition would leave behind a wake of horrible, thin, possibly dead turf. Once the weather dries out and becomes more predictable and stable, we can really push the course for maximum playability. It's always a balancing act.
They say the worst thing about a golf course is that you have to leave it outside and we all know what happens to stuff that is left outside... the weather gets to it!!!
On a completely separate note, the winter flowers are being installed at the Clubhouse today. They should be beautiful in another month once rooted and growing.
The course is coming along quite nicely in all honesty. We have a lot of grass on the course and that's always a good thing. A lot of the details are being wrapped up as well, including the pine straw which was put out while closed. It really dresses the grounds up.
There is a little bit of extra sand on some of the back 9 holes. We had some left over in the parking lot that we needed to clean up so I had the crew spread it on some of the really rocky holes. The sand should disappear quickly once the sun comes out.
One of the very last things to be done is some cart path work. They're a little rough in some spots from all the rain. Last week we received 2 inches of rain in 30 minutes which really caused havoc to the soft paths. Trevor has scheduled some new material to come in and the crew will be out topping off and raking smooth the paths soon.
It was a great summer and the crew accomplished all of our summer agronomy plans. We are poised again to have another great winter golfing season. Hope to see everyone soon!
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