Green, well it should be.

As I rode the course this morning I was troubled by the aesthetic condition, not playability, of the putting surfaces. Although the we haven't done anything different, we have done a few routine items poorly. The culmination of these item is the resulting aesthetic condition of the greens.

What did we do?

In October I instructed the Assistants to start fertilizing the green surrounds to increase turf vigor, which they did every two weeks. On the last application, some of the applicators were not as careful as they should of been and misapplied the material by throwing the fertilizer onto unintended areas causing some of the brown burnt look around the greens...namely the Clubhouse putting green and the little putting green. This training issue has been corrected. 

The next issue has to do with sand top dressing the greens. As you know on Monday we sanded the greens and brushed in the material and all is well. This morning I was noticing the perimeters of many greens have an increased thinning issue. After talking with the Assistants, this increased browning was determined to be caused by the brushing in of the sand. The reason is due to the brush running over some of the edges multiple times sorta grinding the sand into the leave blade excessively. The excessive grinding is like a rug burn. It's superficial, just ugly. This issue has also been corrected. We will now be using a tennis court hand pulled brush to sweep in the sand. 

The last issue that I have observed is the general thinning of the MiniVerde. Kensington has the same grass as we do so I called their Supt to see if they are having the same issue, and he said his greens are just growing out of it. We discussed what he did to alleviate the problems and his solutions fall in line with what I have instructed my staff to do. 

Now that we know what the issues are I have implemented several crucial changes: 1) putting green fertility will be extended out to include the collars and immediate approaches to eliminate any possible surface burn from unintended applications. 2) Sand top dressing will be brushed in by hand using a tennis court brush to eliminate the "grinding" in of the sand which is causing leaf desiccation. 3) I am having the USGA Agronomist stop by asap to look at the putting greens to confirm my theory about thinning on the putting surface or identify what it could possibly be. 

The road to recovery

Now that this changes are in place, here are the protocols implemented to get the greens back into acceptable condition. 1) raise the height of cut a little bit. The green are running over 11 feet daily so the increasing the height of cut will have almost no effect on speed. 2) eliminate the application of all growth regulators to the putting surfaces. We normally try to suppress leaf elongation with a weekly application of a growth regulator to promote ball roll. However, the extension of the leaf blade is exactly what we need right now so the brown tips of the grass can be mowed off. Once we are back to healthy green grass we will reintroduce the growth regulator application. 3) Increase the application of very light rates of nutrients to promote grass growth. Again, growth right now is key to eliminate the brown leaf tips. 4) We are going to make an application of a full strength, very broad spectrum, fungicide to ensure there is nothing adverse working on the plant to inhibit recovery 

The vast majority of our issue are caused by the sand brushing. The forecast is for sunny and warm days, when coupled with the things we are changing should yield much better putting surfaces quickly.