Blast Furnace!

So the phrase "Blast Furnace" has become more commonly used over the last few years.  "Blast Furnace" describes the weather when it is warm and windy, exactly what these next three days will be.  Currently here at the club we are seeing 90.65 degrees with 25mph wind gusts.  This will dry things out fast.  I have to thank Mother Nature for the 1.0" of rain Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.  If we didn't get that rain we'd see some hurting turf come Thursday when the heat and wind are to subside.  The season is another one keeping us on our toes.  Just for comparison I decided to pull up the weather from June 1-18, 2011 to compare to this June 1-18.  Amazingly enough the temperature averages are very close, only a degree off on the average high and low.  The big difference is rainfall and evapotraspiration.  This year compared to last we are down .63" of rain and are up .49" in the evapotranspiration rate.  Putting these two quantities together means there is a shortage of 1.12" of moisture between this June and last June.  We need some more rain!

Irrigation is helping maintain but that's only good for a period of time.  Rain is good clean water with a pH of about 5.3 helping cleanse the soil of impurities and make nutrients available to the plant.  Our irrigation water unfortunately is at a pH of 7.9 along with high salt content.  This makes it difficult for the plants to receive nutrients as the salts bind soil particles together as well and the nutrients to those particles.  We are doing routine soil flushes during these dry periods to help move the salts through the rootzone but still not as good as a quality rain can do.  We try to mimic the rain using our acid injection system and setting the water to a lower pH, yet that doesn't remove the salts from our water.  Here is a good article which gets into better detail on what salts are, do, and how to control: http://archive.lib.msu.edu/tic/gcman/page/1996sep61-70.pdf .  With the recent work we've done to our greens we've been able to address some of these with curative measures.  The new bents are more salt tolerant than the old Poa Annua.  XGD gives us better drainage, also the ability to now flush the greens to help migrate the salts deeper into the soil and out of the rootzone.  "Flushing" is simply a method done by turning on the irrigation system for a substantial period of time to when the soil reaches field capacity.  Field capacity is when the soil pore space is completely filled with water which at this time the hydraulic pressure then forces the water into the XGD system thus releasing the water in the soil and pulling the salts with it to the lower areas of the greens profile.  Like I stated before this is something we have been able to work into our routine maintenance program and try to do once a month.  Along with the the tolerant turf and flushing we do routine "needle tining".  "Needle tining" is a form of aerification but done so with a solid tine only .20" in diameter.  These tines poke small holes which aren't evident after mowing but these small holes allow the exchange of built up gases but also fresh oxygen into the rootzone.  Here is what "needle tining" looks like:

Here Moe is operating our aerifier with needle tines.  The machine is set at 3" spacing and going about 3.5-4" deep

Here is what the holes look like from needle tining

Lately we've been carrying this task out each week.  With as dry as it has been this helps with getting oxygen to the roots as we've had to use a great deal of our irrigation water.  This also aids us when we do "flush" to get water in through the turf canopy.

Along with our watering routines during these dry periods we are being sure to stay on track with our spray applications.  Currently we are running 14 day cycles on our spraying of greens and tees.  Fairways we are stretching to 21 days as the dry weather has created less disease pressure.  Last night Nathan and I came in to get all greens sprayed knowing the weather was going to be hectic today.  With strong winds our spray application may have had reduced coverage so we took advantage of the calm conditons of last night to get most of the greens sprayed. 

Our routine tasks continue to be carried out and getting caught up on detail work.  These next few days we'll be focused on detail tasks with getting things conditioned for JUF day.  We hope that everyone had a great Father's Day!