Traffic vs. Turfgrass

Pity the poor turf: Foot and vehicular traffic are a constant source of stress to turf. There are several types of traffic-related damage, the most important of which are wear damage and soil compaction. Wear damage: ouch! Would you rather get a paper cut or a scrape? Most people would pick the paper cut because it hurts less, occurs on a smaller area, and heals faster. The same principles apply to turf. A well sharpened mower causes minimal injury because it provides a clean cut on a small surface area – like a paper cut. But the type of damage caused by foot and cart traffic results in bruising and tearing of turf that causes plant tissues to lose water as well as the chlorophyll they need for photosynthesis. Plant death is the result. Soil compaction is heavy stuff: Traffic also compacts soil par-ticles so tightly that water and air can’t move in or out of the soil, and plant roots can’t penetrate the rock hard soils. With no root growth, the plant suffers from lack of nutrients and water, which in turn results in slower growth, inability to recover from injury and eventually, death. You can be part of the solution: Golfers can help improve course performance by following these traffic guidelines: • When requested, keep golf carts on path. • When entering and exiting fairways, scatter to avoid multiple carts driving on the same tracks. • Follow cart traffic directions. • When walking on and off greens and tees, avoid walking on areas of stressed turf. • Comply with frost delays. Bottom line: Foot and golf cart traffic cause damage to turf by scraping and ripping leaf tissues, as well as by compacting the soil. But by implementing traffic management strategies, turf damage can be minimized. Limiting carts to paths, using ropes to rotate traffic into less-used areas, frost delays and avoiding stressed turf when walking or driving are effective tools for limiting traffic damage. Traffic damage can be a big problem on golf courses, but by cooperating with these traffic management strategies, golfers can be a part of the solution

Updates

The greens have been nothing but great after aerifaction. They were completly healed within 10 days of coring and you cannot tell we even aerified now. Much thanks to mother nature and the good growing weather. The greens were stimped this past Saturday am rolling 10.2. As most of you know when we get to a winter we will have them in upwards of 12 plus on the stimp. The tees were overseeded this year at 625 pounds per acre. They also had a great grow in thanks to the weather. We are currently mowing them at 3/4" and will get down to almost a 1/2" in the next few weeks. Lastly there will be more trafficing with ropes, stakes, and chains in the next few weeks. This is in aid to keep the best possible conditions in our fairways for the winter months. In our next blog we will go in depth as to the benefits of doing this.

Successful Green Aerification and Tee Overseeding

It has been a couple weeks since the last post, but as you could imagine, these have been a very busy and important couple weeks for the golf course as we prepared ourselves for the winter ahead of us. We aerified our greens Sept 23rd and 24th. We used a smaller size tine than usually done here, but the holes were spaced closer together. We anticipated with the size and spacing to remove just under 10% of the surface area on our greens. Ideally you want to remove 20% of the surface area per year on your greens. The greens have healed up nicely a week later and look very healthy. The greens will be back down to the normal mowing height tomorrow morning and we can then start working on the greens normally and get back to a truer and consistent roll.

The tees were overseeded Sept 29th and 30th. We have roped off all of our tees to keep traffic off the seed.

 We have been watering constantly throughout the day to keep the seed moist. We are already starting to see some germination on most of the tees just a week later. We anticipate to get our first mow on the tees around the October 14th.Until then we want to thank everybody for there patience and cooperation during these very frustrating weeks (as a golfer)!! We are very pleased to call this aerification and overseedng a huge success and it should show out on the golf course throughout these upcoming weeks and months!