The most valuable commodity

If you were to think about what is the most precious "thing" you need to have in order to have a great golf course what would you think of? Would it be people, fertilizer, machines or maybe even pesticides? I would say a good water source. 

As many of you know the Club receives reuse irrigation water from the City of Naples. I got a phone call from the City reuse water people on Tuesday that I've been waiting for, but also dreeding. It wasn't good news, the City is out of water to supply us with for irrigation. Anyone that has lived in Naples for a while knows that this time of the year it gets really hot and really dry. 

This time of the year I can usually consume 750,000 gallons of reuse water every night to keep up with the water needs of the course. Due to the reduced flows of incoming sewer supply from the vast majority of City residence leaving to go back north for the summer, I'm lucky if I get enough reuse water to irrigate the course 3-4 days a week. Needless to say the course is going to start showing signs of drying down. 

The course a few weeks ago with plenty of irrigation water. 

The extreme potential of what could happen, but we are no where near this. Not to worry though. Once the rains come and we start watering a little more the grass will green right back up. 

As a result of the limited suply of reuse water, my team has been forced to rely on our emergency well pumps to supply water to our crucial areas of the course first, such as greens and tees, and then water whatever we can afterwards. It's important to know we only have 24 million gallons of water to last the entire year so we can go hog wild using the wells right now. If we consume the backup supply quickly and the dry period lasts for a while we will be in a pickle. 

The good news is the rainy season is just around the corner and then the City should be able to build its reserves back up and supply us the needed resource. Until then, a little brown isn't so bad. 

Teaching others to blog

Today I gave a 20 minute talk, seemed only like 2 minutes, to a group of Superintendents about how blogging can help them communicate.  My talk concentrated on how effective and easy blogging is. I shared a lot of my experiences with how the Club's membership has used the blog as the go to source for information about the course. There was a lot of "holy crap, that's looks really easy to do!" 

All I kept saying was "You're right & your membership will love it!"

Perfect temperatures

The Bermuda grass on the golf course loves the same temperatures you do. The mid 80 days and the cool 60's at night are perfect....I call it the 150 rule. That's when you add the day time and night temps together and the closer you get to. 150 the better the growing weather it is. Funny, it's also the perfect temps for us too!

All this growth doesn't come without some negatives though. As we transition out of winter survival mode and back into active growth control there's a little transition period the course goes through where if you know what to look for you can tell this are happening. One of those things is very light scalping of the grass as we begin to gently dig into the grain as seem in the picture below. 

Notice how the scalping isn't all the way across the fairway as is just in the one mower width. This is where the machine was digging into the grain during that specific direction of travel. When the machine traveled the other direction it was going with the grain and didn't scalp. 

As the summer progresses I will have my staff slowing intensify on grain control, culminating when the course closes and we heavily verticut the fairways. For now though, don't worry if you see a tiny bit of scalping...it's on purpose 

Augusta National Syndrome

This week is hell for Superintendents some times. Some golf members watch tv and see the holy place of golf and then think to their own course and wonder why their own course doesn't look like Augusta National. It can be a trying time to explain to someone that it's like trying to compare apples and tomatoes. Both are red, but in totally different categories.

This morning as I was scanning my social media outlets I saw this great picture of Augusta National mowing their fairways. I have a great friend who worked at Augusta National and when asked why there are no stripes in the turf he said, "It's simple, anyone can mow stripes into the turf. It takes extra effort to not mow stripes."  During the course of regular play the fairways are cut from the tee to the green, but during the tournament the direction is reversed and the fairways are cut from the green towards the tee. 

And if your wondering about the apples and tomatoes thing....there's almost a million dollars of fairways mowers in this one picture. I use 2 mowers regularly, sometimes a third for a special occasion. 

Operation Pollinator

I've always thought of my job as part grass grower, part artist, and part environmental steward.  So when an opportunity came up to get involved in a project to help the native environment I stepped right up.  The project I am referring to is to help native wild pollinators....yep, bees.  Many are unaware that the numbers of pollinating insects have declined significantly in recent years. The decline has been linked to habitat loss, diseases and viruses, changes in agriculture practices and urban sprawl among other factors. While farm landscapes often lack the diversity and abundance of flowers that pollinators require, recent research has shown this trend can be reversed.
Requirements for supporting a pollinator community include a range of foraging habitats, with diverse, rich nectar and pollen nutrition, as well as adequate nesting areas. This is where Operation Pollinator provides a multifunctional landscape solution and golf courses are perfect for this.

The Club's role in Operation Pollinator is really just one of public awareness.  The golf course already has all of the multitudes of habitats, and with all of the flowers all over the place there is an abundance of food for the pollinators.  If you have ever stopped to admire the flowers around the property you've seen all the bees flying around.  The one things that the golf course provides that is essential form any public awareness campaign to be successful is a great audience.  So like many of the things that are done around the golf course, there are secondary benefits to having the beautiful flowers other than the obvious. 

In the next couple of days my staff will put out some signs like the one above. The signs will help give awareness to one of the many great environmental things that are being done on the golf course that probably would go unnoticed. 

Against the grain

We've all heard Johnny Miller talk about "gain" and how it is going to affect a putt. Honestly, Johnny is full of horse hockey since today's greens are mowed down to less than 1/10 of an inch for tournaments...trust me, there's no grain in a putting green you see on tv. However, the higher the heights of cut you have (like fairways and tees), the more tendency for grain you have.

For those who don't know what grain is when referring when talking about grass, grain is referring to the tendency of the leaves of the grass to grow in a specific direction. The grain is what gives golf courses striping, or different color patterns in the grass.  There are old wive's tales about grass growing towards water or the setting sun, but that's all not true. The truth is, there's no known reason why a grass tends to grow / or lean a certain direction. What is known is that grain is a natural phenomenon and it has to be managed. 

Here is a picture of some grain on our Celebration Bermuda grass fairways. 

All of the grass in the above picture is Celebration, it has just developed some severe grain. The way we manage the grain during the active growing season is through heavy vertical mowings and frequent grooming. Now that the weather is warming up and will continue to warm up, I can begin to work on managing the grain. Excessive grain control through the cold winter months can lead to thinning turf and bare ground so I do not do a lot of grain control through the winter months. 

So rest assured that the golf course isn't being plagued with the return of all the different types of Bermuda grass we had prior to the renovation. What you are seeing is just the Celebration grass growing strong and doing its thing. The Celebration's strong growth habit is the exact reason why it was chosen for the renovation. 

A Superintendent's nightmare

You know what they say, "the worst thing about a golf course is that you have to leave it outside!" Well the second worst thing a Supt has to potentially go through  happened yesterday  (waking up to a course covered in disease is the first). I'm referring to the fast moving storm with very powerful winds ripping through the pristine golf course my team had prepared for this weekend's invitational event. Wednesday morning around 10 o'clock I was riding the course just so proud of my team for what they had accomplished this year with course and how impeccable it was that day, just perfect for the invitational. 

Well it's 5:12 a.m. and I've been at the course since 4:10 this morning with my staff trying like hell to clean up the wrath of the storm.  There is debris everywhere and we can't begin to clean it up with the blowers and machines until closer to 7, but by starting that late we won't be able to accomplish much before the shotgun start. Nonetheless we are going to give it a go and do what we can do. The only good news is that the 3/4 inch of rain we received seems to have been handled very well by the course I can't find any wet spots. Of course is completely pitch black right now but hey....I'm hopeful!