90 Day War

 Not that long ago, I was blogging about how great the course looked because of all of the rain that we had received.  Unfortunately for the month of July, the rain basically shut off.  The golf course has had all of 3/4 of an inch of rain since the start of July.  Our non irrigated turf is going dormant, and any areas on the course that do not receive adequate irrigation are showing signs of stress.  Rainfall is always a better source of water than irrigation is.  While we have virtually all of the sprinkler heads on the course operating, the distribution uniformity is never perfect.  The longer we go using irrigation as our only source of precipitation, we will get more dry areas, and along with that we will also make more wet areas because of the sprinkler head pattern.

When the season gets like this, as a maintenance staff, we do everything we can to just keep the grass alive.  We will be doing additional hand watering and setting up additional sprinklers on the course.  The cooler mornings that we are getting this week allow for a little bit of relief, because the lower temperatures will allow the grass to start each day with less stress.  High temperatures in the 90's and lows in the 70's are very hard on cool season grasses.  Zoysia and Bermudagrass love the higher temperatures.  Our Creeping Bentgrass fairways, tees, and greens can just shut down in the higher temperatures, consume all of their stored carbohydrates, and then just die off.  

The goal of everything we do throughout the year is to make the grass healthy enough to survive what we call the 90 day war(June, July, August).  We are inside the last 30 days, and hopefully we can make it through without any significant turf loss.