The golf course here at Kenmure is made up of mostly creeping bentgrass. Bentgrass prefers cooler temperatures and moist soils to preform at its best. The conditions around this area favor bentgrass for most of the year, but in the summer things can get difficult for the grass. When we are faced with very high air and soil temperatures the grass does not preform well at all. This becomes an even more difficult situation when we have large amounts of disease pressure as well as cart traffic. The three most important things that we do to keep the turf healthy are spraying fungicides, watering adequately, and managing cart traffic properly.
The spray program at Kenmure is something that much thought and planning go into every season. The club makes a serious investment every year into our chemical spraying budget. The spray program is very safe and all pesticides are applied under the supervision of licensed applicators. The products and formulations that are available in today’s market are very safe and have very low rates of use.
Water management is probably the most difficult job during the summer months. It is our goal to try and keep the fairways as dry as possible to allow for maximum ball roll. This task becomes complex during periods of high stress in our fairways. Heavy clay soils and subsurface rocks make trouble for us. The greens and tees have modified soils and can be easier to maintain than the fairways. The irrigation system is a very good tool but it definitely has its limits. We attempt to use hand watering as much as possible to get the water exactly where we want it.
Cart traffic becomes a large factor during later summer when most of the bentgrass roots have completely died in the fairways. The added stress from the golf carts in the summer is unneeded and very counter productive considering the time, money and effort spent on chemicals and watering. We will close different holes and sometimes the entire course to cart traffic if we reach extreme climate conditions.
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