Audubon & Bluebirds

As promised, here is the last of the updates on current hot topics here at Winchester. Many have noticed that some bird boxes have been installed around the course. These boxes are designed and installed specifically for bluebird nesting, although they sometimes are used by other small birds like tree swallows and house wrens.

Building, installing and monitoring these boxes has long been a personal passion of mine and, fortunately, the property of Winchester and the values of ValleyCrest lend themselves perfectly to continuing this hobby. We at ValleyCrest encourage every property we become partners with to participate in the Aububon International Cooperative Sanctuary Program for Golf Courses. Involvement in this certification program by no means obligates a course to become 100% organic, or go "all green", but merely provides helpful resources, guidelines and assistance in encouraging courses to become more aware of their maintenance practices' interactions and effects on the environment and wildlife habitats. In all honesty, most all superintendents I know love and respect nature and the environment (it's why most of us have these jobs in the first place!) so participation in this program is often occurs naturally and with very little extra effort.

Part of the Audubon certification process is to complete some environmental and wildlife-related projects on the course. Building and monitoring these bluebird habitats fit that niche perfectly. During the winter, while stuck inside during rain storms, we built 9 boxes to start with. They were installed about a month ago, and you can see already that Winchester's birds have taken a liking to them.

This box is located on #17 near the maintenance building. We build these side doors for easy monitoring and you can see a bluebird nest here is nearing completion.

And as of this morning, the box on the driving range near the pitching green already has the start of a family! The mama bird was sitting on these eggs as I opened it, but flew away before I could get a picture.

We'll continue to provide you with updates on the birds and these boxes, as well as other parts of the Audubon certification program that we will continually be working on.

Battling Poa

As promised, here's the update on the next hot-button topic here at Winchester: Poa annua (also know as Annual Bluegrass), and what to do about it. As I'm sure many people know, this battle is raging on golf courses across the US. And few, if any, have been largely successful at taking down the enemy. In fact, many have simply chosen to embrace it, and nurture Poa to become a decent, sometimes excellent, playing surface on it's own.

However, we still have enough of the originally intended grass for our putting surfaces, bentgrass, that it makes the fight still worth fighting. Bentgrass is optimal not merely as a more consistent, smoother putting surface, but also from a management standpoint, as it tends to need less water, less fertilization, and is susceptible to fewer diseases (in this part of the country) than Poa. So the war battles on....

A key part of our Poa management strategy is chemical control through growth regulation. We use two plant growth regulators (Trimmit and Primo) to help us give the bentgrass a competitive edge over the Poa. So far this year, we've made two applications of this mix, and you can begin to see some mild results already:

#18 Green: A very obvious visual - the Poa really stands out here, partly from the production of seedheads (which come out in a flush as the plant gets stressed, and cause alot of bumpiness that golfers really don't enjoy) as well as the yellowing and browning cause by the growth regulator itself.

Here's a bit closer showing the selectivity of the growth regulators: healthy bentgrass surrounding a really stressed out and stunted patch of Poa.

And even closer....this is what we're looking for. The lighter green, short blades with attached brownish seedheads is the Poa, stunted and tight. But the longer, greener blades of bentgrass are poking through. So even as the Poa may not completely die out, we hope to see this bentgrass continue to growth, thrive and push through and over the Poa to choke it out and leave us only with our most desired grass.

This is definitely not a process that occurs overnight. It's a long and difficult road. But combined with other management practices that favor bentgrass over Poa, we hope to beat back the current population and attempt to revert the greens to bentgrass, to the best of our ability. Stay tuned for other ways that we manage to give bentgrass the competitive edge in future posts. And for the last hot-button topic: bluebird boxes and Audubon!

Drainage Quick Fixes

It's been some time since our last post, but it's not for lack of things to post about. In fact, just the opposite....we've all been so busy there's been no real time to sit down and punch out an update!

But as we get busier, we understand that these updates and educational posts are even more important to our members and customers. So allow me to catch you up on the three most talked about aspects of the course at this moment. We'll start by dedicating this post to the first: drainage.

The course has dried out beautifully in between the now sparser rain storms...except for a few very obvious areas: #3 approach, #4 blue tee and #8 fairway. After much investigation and exploration, we're at a loss to pinpoint where this water is coming from to be able to control it from the exact source. It seems to be seeping out the hillsides everywhere. So while we explore some more permanent and long term solutions, so we don't end up dealing with this problem areas every spring, we've gone to work on some rough, generic, but effective drainage solutions.

After digging this huge hole to investigate the irrigation mainline, nothing was found leaking, and the water continues to fill the hole from elsewhere. A drain  has now been installed from this seepage point down the entire approach, and another in the right rough about 50 yards out. Both should dry this area out and provide better turf conditions.

Though not very obvious in this picture, the back right corner of this tee has about 1/2" of water sitting on it. We've since put in a drain around this corner to catch the water and divert it around the tee. The tee is already much drier and we've been able to finally mow the whole thing.

#8 fairway is by far the worst problem. Water seeps out of severl locations along the right rough, as seen in this picture, and runs along the turf surface through large portions of the fairway landing area. Despite many existing drains in this area, the water continues to cause a problem. Here we've since cut a trench along the rough line to stop the water from reaching the fairway and diverted it to a functioning drain we found. With a few days of sun, the fairway should dry out enough for us to mow and begin getting it back into much more playable condition.

Thank you for your patience with these projects, and keep checking back for updates on a more long-term solution that we've begun looking into. Also check back soon for updates on two other hot-button topics: Poa control and new bluebird nestboxes. More coming soon!