Heat Wave Continues

Temperatures have continued to stay hot and humid. Heat indexes have been over the 110 degree mark a few times over the past week or so.  The maintenance team has been busy trying to keep things cool along with our normal maintenance practices trying to keep everything as cool as possible and trying not to damage the grass with the equipment in the heat of the day.  All in all everything seems to be holding up pretty well.  The greens are showing a little stress in spots, but this is pretty normal under these conditions and hopefully the weather is going to cool off tomorrow like the forecasters are saying.  One thing I would like to ask everyone's help with is being diligent with the cart traffic in our roughs.  Majority of you do a great job of keeping the carts out of the roughs all the time, however it is very important this time of year to be as diligent as possible as the turf is in a fragile state and it doesn't take much to stress it out and cause damage with cart traffic.  Thank you all for your help and your willingness to help us out.   I apologize for not updating my last post with pictures from the tee line installation that is occurring on the driving range.   I have attached a couple pictures below of the concrete installation and then the beginning of the turf installation.  The contractors are on schedule to hopefully finish sometime later this week if the last roll of the turf arrives.  If it doesn't they may have to finish the beginning of next week and then once the turf has been glued down for 24 hours it is ready to use.  We are still trying to get the tees aerified.  Hot temperatures have caused us some delays as our staff has been busy doing other things.  My hope is that either later this week or next week we will be aerifying the tees which should only take us a week or so to complete.  I don't know how many of you have played lately and noticed the new Crabapple trees that we installed on holes # 3,10, & 18.  We put these trees in areas where we think they provide some nice color variations and provide a little backdrop to the green complexes. Well that about does it for today.  I hope everyone is able to stay inside and stay as cool as possible for the rest of today.  We are hoping the cool down tomorrow happens and that some of this heat and humidity gets out of here.  Stay cool and we hope to see you on the course soon!

Summer Weather and Rain Continue

Hot temperatures and high humidities along with bouts of rain have become the norm as of late here in Kansas City.  I have seen summers that are very hot and dry and I have seen summers where it has been very cool and wet, but I don't recall any that have been as wet and hot thus the high humidities as this year.  The maintenance staff has been staying busy trying to keep up with watering, mowing,  and keeping the diseases under control which has been a challenge.  Our new putting green has continued to hold up pretty well with all the traffic and heat.  However we do have one edge where the seed washed out several times during grow in that the turf never was able to mature enough to withstand the foot traffic it is receiving.  We will be patching in this area with some sod this week during this brief break in the temperatures.  Also this week we will be getting our new artificial turf tee line installed on the driving range tee.  I will post pictures once the contractor gets started. They were delayed today due to the 1.25" of rain that we received overnight.  Bunkers have become a topic of conversation lately as I have heard from some that they think they are too firm or don't have enough sand in them.  We changed up how we rake the bunkers this year and the frequency in how many times we rake them during the week to try and firm them up. Last year and even this spring members comments were they thought our bunkers were to soft and had too much sand in spots causing the ball to not release to the middle of the bunkers.  I feel that along with the change in our raking techniques that the firmness is a result of all the rain we have had.  The new bunkers that we have redone in the past two years aren't quite as firm because they do not have contaminated sand in them like the old ones due to the new linears we installed, keeping the new sand free and clean from the silt that washes during the heavy rains.  The comments on the new bunkers are that they are playing nicely and aren't quite as firm as the old ones.  We rake all the bunkers the same, so the difference is in the clean new sand being a better playing surface due to them not having contamination in them.  Our plan is too however add some sand to a few of our bunkers that wash out frequently where we have had to scoop silt and sand out of them following the storms.  I have been waiting on the rain chances to slow down so that the new sand won't get contaminated right away by a big rain event.  Like I said I will post some photos I hope later in the week of the new tee line installation. Have a great week!

Course Update with Crazy Weather

Needless to say our weather over the past week or so has been CRAZY!  High temperatures have been in the upper 90's to low 70's and lows have ranged from low 60's to mid to upper 70's.  Throw on top of that quite a bit of rain and humidity and you got yourself a tough situation when it comes to growing grass.  Root structure for the turf is shallow due to the frequent rain events so when the temperatures do soar into the upper 80's and 90's things get a little hairy trying to keep cool season roughs alive and not over water them at the same time.  This set up also makes managing greens a challenge as the frequent moisture and high humidity cause disease pressure and make water management very difficult.  Due to the amounts of moisture and humidity it is tough to keep green speeds consistent day in and day out.  Example is one day it will be 80 degrees with 65% humidity and the greens will be slower then when it is 90 degrees and 35% humidity and we are applying a lot more water by hand to areas on  the greens.  They will tend to be quicker on the hotter day due to the lack of humidity and moisture in the air.  During these temperature extremes we also have to be smart with how much equipment pressure we put on the greens (i.e. rollers, verticut, topdress, etc.) to try and not cause anymore stress then they are already under.  This is always a tough juggling act for all superintendents as we want the greens to be as fast as anyone while keeping them healthy and alive. We currently are mowing our greens at .105" and are rolling them 4-5 days a week depending on the weather.   We verticut and topdressed the greens on Monday taking advantage of the rain and cooler weather that we are forecast for on Tuesday and Wednesday.  This practice will help to remove any leaf tissue that the mowers have missed (which is one of the factors in green speed) and will help us to incorporate our topdressing sand better all while providing a nice opening in the surface so that oxygen and water can move down into the root zone.  There aren't a lot of years that I verticut on July 6th as temperatures and stress on the greens is usually to high for them to tolerate it.  This will help with some of the inconsistency in speed, but a lot of it will still depend on the weather conditions each day.  Our goal is to have the greens as close to our standard green speed day in and day out, but the moisture levels and temperature readings dictate the speeds a lot more then most people know.  Also the later in the day you play the slower greens typically get as the turf grows throughout the day.  We try to slow this growth process down by applying growth regulators, but they still tend to grow, hence why we mow them about every day.

We received 1.75" of rain over night and didn't have a lot of storm damage.  I feel very fortunate that we dodged a bullet with some of the areas around Kansas City that got hit pretty hard by flooding and high winds.  However there is more rain in the forecast and depending on who you watch or what you read it looks like there is the possibility for a lot more rain.  My hope is that it misses us and things will stay like they are and we can get back to our normal schedule on Wednesday and Thursday of mowing and doing our normal maintenance.  Also as soon as conditions dry out we will try and finish our fairway and tee aerification.  We are almost done on the fairways as the only ones left are (1,2,3,7, & 18) and we still have all of the tees and driving range to complete.