Fusariummy

For the past 4 years I have had the luxury of using a central controller to control our irrigation system. In my travels and consumption of golf maintenance media, I have never read anything with any substance about strategies that superintendents use to program their central controllers. The literature that supports these software solutions are severely outdated and lacking and there are virtually no online tutorials to help managers improve how they use these powerful tools. This blog post will be my first attempt to share some of the ways I use my central controller to effectively irrigate my golf course. I currently have a RainBird Stratus 2 Central . Sure it looks like it was made in 1998 but it actually has some very powerful features that not a lot of people fully utilize. Flow Zones - These basically tell your computer how much water each sprinkler zone has access to. The advantage of using this system is that it makes it extremely easy to make quick programs for very specific...

Most of our greens have slowly transitioned towards bentgrass dominated swards in the past few years In a recent post I discussed how the nutrient content of the soils was different depending on the depth and outlined some ideas of how we could use this to our advantage. We can keep poa super happy with more consistency (it's known to be temperamental and this is probably why) or we can use it to suppress poa while promoting other turf species like bentgrass or fescue. There are major differences in nutrient content at depth and it is useful to understand this but it is also cumbersome to test at various depths or tissue test every week like some might do. Instead, we can use our Supercharged fertilizer and clipvol records to help us understand how much nutrient we are removing from the turfgrass system and adjust our fertilizer applications to either under-fertilize or apply a sufficient amount of each nutrient to favor one turfgrass species over the other. We can estimate how mu...

I have had so much fun over the past 4 years learning more about how poa grows and how I can either make it better or worse to maintain quality putting surfaces while trying to promote bentgrass as much as I can. I am constantly told that it's impossible to grow anything other than poa in my climate but what I have found is that through careful record keeping and soil testing, we have the tools to keep poa angry for almost 12 months of the year. When I left my previous course the greens were predominantly creeping bentgrass and the grass grew almost exactly as expected. When I arrived at my current course the greens were mostly poa annua and I struggled to get the growth that I expected for the amount of nitrogen I was applying. The chart below shows the drastically low clipping yield that we experience during my first year at the new job. This was despite applying more nitrogen than I have in years. The previous superintendent warned me that these greens needed more phosphorus tha...

I've always loved greenkeeping. I love everything about it, the challenge, the hours, and especially the people. Lately there has been a lot of talk about how we can address issues with attracting and retaining skilled people to help us maintain our golf courses. When I started at my new club with a larger staff one of the most surprising things to me was how much I enjoy working with others. Until that time, I was usually alone and most of my efforts to stay interested in my work revolved around crazy agronomic stuff. While that is obviously still the case, I have found a great deal of joy working and learning from my staff and helping them develop their skills further so that they can add more value to our operation and find more enjoyment in the work they do every day.  I'm certainly not an expert in labor relations and I normally don't poke my nose into this side of the business but over the past 4 years I have stumbled across some things that I think bring our operatio...

In my previous two posts I shared how changes to our mowing and rolling frequency resulted in better playing condition for half the price. This post will show how our growth rate contribute to that success and maybe will suggest one of the reasons I'm so obsessed with clipvol. It's the holy grail of turfgrass management. I initially measured clipvol to optimize our mowing frequency. I didn't want to cut greens if there wasn't any growth and I also didn't want to cut the greens and get too much grass. Over the years I have found that the ideal clipvol is about 20ml/m^2 per day. This is the figure I use in my Growth Ratio and is the target clipvol I aim for when I send out my mower. I can keep green speeds within our target easily with a clipvol within this range as can be seen in my previous post. What this means is that I want to get the exact same clipvol with every mowing. As I adjust the growth rates, the frequency of mowing will adjust to get this target clipvo...

In a previous post I showed how changes to our mowing and rolling frequency cut our equipment use costs on our greens in half. This post will discuss how those changes impacted our green speed. It's great to be able to cut costs but it also has to take the course conditions into account. My philosophy has always been that you need to keep conditions the same if you are cutting costs. This is, of course, unless you are facing a substantial financial crisis where some loss of playability is justified. Either way, if you have the option, try to keep conditions the same or better if improving efficiency. I consider myself lucky as our greens have some extreme slopes so our green speed is limited by topography not ego. We even skip rolling on a few greens to keep speeds lower because they become unplayable at speeds over 11'. Our daily target is 10 with a low of 9 and a high of 11. This is based off golfer feedback. The chart below shows the average green speeds per month per year....

When I finally started collecting data in a meaningful way I began to find that there is all sorts of questions that I can ask the data that I may not have previously thought of. Why would I want to ask new questions that I previously didn't need? Well, there are many things that I can do to improve our operations but it is often difficult to quantify how effective these strategies are. One of the things I recently asked of my equipment data, was to summarize how often we mow and roll our greens broken down by month and year. There are many decimals because we sometimes skip mowing specific greens and my equipment database can determine the percent of the total area maintained each day. For most this is probably needlessly complicated but nonetheless I calculate it because I can. I do not have data before 2019 because I wasn't the superintendent before that time, but I estimate that the greens would have been cut 200 times and rolled 100 times based off annual equipment hour me...