Here Comes the Heat!

After all the whining and complaining about the rain and dismal weather this spring from superintendents and golfers, mother nature appears to have decided that it's time for payback.  Although, this time most of the complaining will be coming from superintendents and not the golfers.  We are in the midst of a very dry strech, but this weeks cooler temperatures provided some great golfing conditions.  Without much heat we were really able to dry out the golf course without too much risk of having grass wilt and die.  The coming week will be a different story with the forecast calling for a significant amount of heat and humidity.

Over the past few days we have made some preparations for the heat.  The first is that we have "loaded up" on irrigation Thursday night and Friday night.  Once the heat and humidity arrives, we want to be watering as little as possible.  Irrigating at night prolongs the amount of time that the grass is wet and encourages fungal disease, so we watered everything the past two nights so that we can wait until the heat has passed to water.  During the heat, we will try to get everything by with hand watering and running sprinklers selectively during the day.

We will also be easing off some of our mowing and rolling of the greens, and the front rollers on the mowers have been changed to solid rollers to limit the stress on the turf.  Our normal rollers (on the mower) are grooved to allow the mower to settle into the turf and provide a truer height of cut, but these grooves can be stressfull on the turf, especially on the cleanup passes when the mowers are turning.  So for this heat wave, we have switched our front rollers to solid rollers without grooves.

If the heat wave really comes to fruition, I will make sure to keep the blog updated on how the course is holding up, and some more of the strategies that we use to make sure the turf comes out of it healthy.