How often does a course need to be "maintained"?

[Gary_Mahanay]

Donnie,

     I'm from McKinney and very familar with most of the courses in the north Texas area.  During your years at Grayson, did you intern at any of the golf courses in the area?  How long have you been gone from this part of the country?

Gary

[John Gosselin]

Donnie, earlier in this thread it was implied that your style of golf course maintenance was a minimalist approach and that mother nature took care of things for you. After reading your summary of your programs those comments seem to be very misleading. I realize that there was some friendly banter in there, but in reality wouldn’t you agree that it takes a very intense maintenance program to achieve the results "firm and fast" that you’re looking for?

[Steve Curry]

John,

I will say as a super that it is challenging to maintain fast and firm but requires less inputs, barring human enery.


Donnie,

I have eliminated wetting agents from my programs.  I believe by deep tining 5-6 times per year on greens and aerating twice/year on fairways I have been able to get away from them.

Steve

[Craig Sweet]

Here is what was said regarding Donnie's practice.

"Donnie's modus operandi for maintaining Fishers Island is so sophisticated compared to the way other golf courses are maintained by other supers it would completely blow your mind.

The key to Donnie's success at Fishers is Donnie does a whole lot more of allowing Mother Nature to work for him while Donnie spends much more time than any other super in the world possibly could trying to catch fish!"
   
I don't want to answer for Don, but "sophisticated" can be either simple or complex. It appears that Don has a good understanding of the role "mother nature" plays in golf course maintenence and chooses to work with it rather than fight it.

Golf courses are living things and are quite "simple" in their complexity.  Often they do just fine if man does nothing more than fill in the missing parts they need from time to time. For example, during drought, provide water.

From what I have seen during my 17 years dealing with plants, 90% of the problems that occur in a landscape/backyard lawn/golf course,etc, are a direct response to something "man" has done. The old cause and effect thing. Being "aware" of what you are doing, is a big part of successfully maintaining a healthy golf course/landscape/etc...

[John Gosselin]

Steve, I am sorry I don't understand what less inputs mean.

[Steve Curry]

John,

By inputs I mean fuel, electricity, fertilizer, water, fungicides...


Steve

[TEPaul]

"Donnie's modus operandi for maintaining Fishers Island is so sophisticated compared to the way other golf courses are maintained by other supers it would completely blow your mind.
The key to Donnie's success at Fishers is Donnie does a whole lot more of allowing Mother Nature to work for him while Donnie spends much more time than any other super in the world possibly could trying to catch fish!"

Fellas, fellas---when I said that I was being ironical---you know, I was trying to be sort of humorous!  

(some time ago our in-house wordsmith and text editor, Dan Kelly, emailed me and told me I should try to dial down on using smiley faces all the time whenever humor is attempted--that it's better that way. Maybe Dan was wrong to say that!).  

[George Pazin]

Donnie, earlier in this thread it was implied that your style of golf course maintenance was a minimalist approach and that mother nature took care of things for you. After reading your summary of your programs those comments seem to be very misleading. I realize that there was some friendly banter in there, but in reality wouldn’t you agree that it takes a very intense maintenance program to achieve the results "firm and fast" that you’re looking for?

I think if you reread one of Donnie's early posts, you'll see that he actually said it was more work to maintain things firm and fast.

-----

This is a thread that would fit in quite well in the good old salad days of GCA, back when it was just started. Tons of good interesting info that us players and armchair critics would never ever have the oppotunity to learn (if we weren't as ambitious as Dick Daley ).I recall an old thread where a discussion of The Heathlands in Myrtle Beach (I think) led to a very educational thread on water reservoirs on golf courses - it was similarly enlightening.

Thanks, everyone.

[Brian_Ewen]

Guys
As with the Thatch thread a few months back , very enjoyable and educational .

More posts like these please.
Brian

[Donnie Beck]

Gary,

I am orginally from Connecticut so I interned back east. I have been at Fishers since 94'. I worked part time at tanglewood while I was there.  I visited several others while in the area.. Stonebrige Ranch, Dallas Athletic Club, Colonial, and others the names just aren't coming to me at the moment.

[A_Clay_Man]

Clearly there must be some very long-term bottomline benefits in optimizing the turf quality.

Can these be quantified? and if so, perhaps then, these ideals would get published into a textbook?

Thanx for the review.

Craig, Here in the Land of Evaporativetransport, I believe I heard a New Mexico University turf guy report that 1 1/2 inches of irrigation is all that is needed for Blue Grass in this region. While you do get slightly more precip than we do, the climates sound very similar. I'm not a turf guy.

At Pg, the greens were cut every other day. This was one aspect that turned out to be very challenging. Since it was Poa annua, the speeds were dramatically different day in day out.

On the public courses I have frequented, fairway mowing only happened once a week. Usually on Mondays or Tuesdays, by the weekend, it was/is full shag, on blue fwys.
I figured it was done this way, so the weekend traffic didn't do as much damage, but I always wondered why they would give their biggest revenue generating customers the worse conditions, but people still come back.

[Craig Sweet]

Adam, yes our climates are similar. Generally, from the end of June until the end of August we are very dry, and are lucky if we get over 1 1/2" of precip. total over those 60 days. There is little humidity and often we have afternoon winds that dry everything out.

Our irrigation runs for about 25 minutes per set of heads, and over all we put down around 650,000 gals. over about 100 acres (it might be more)of irrigated turf every night.  

That is what I am told by our super.

The course drys out very rapidly and drainage is excellent.

We mow our fairways 3 times a week, the greens everyday.

Our last fairway mowing is on Friday and by Sunday evening they are a tad longer.

[A_Clay_Man]

Craig, Sorry I forgot the timeframe. It was 1 1/2" per week.

[Donnie Beck]

Here are my yearly water totals for the last 5 years.

2000 - 6,158,600 Gal.
2001 - 6,774,600 Gal.
2002 - 6,960,000 Gal.
2003 - 4,734,000 Gal.
2004 - 6,645,800 Gal.

[Gary_Mahanay]

Donnie,

     What is your average annual rainfall?  How many acres of fairway, rough, and greens are irrigated?  Are your greens a high percertage sand (USGA-spec) or push up (native soil-high loam content) type?  As you know here in the north Texas area during a hot & windy July and August we can water in a week or two what you use in your highest volume year.  Especially with a place like I work that has over 2000 Rainbird 900 series heads.

Gary

[Donnie Beck]

Gary,

We average around 45" per year. I irrigate 6 acres of greens about 3 acres of approaches and about 1.5 acres of tees. Our greens were built in 1926 so they are all push ups.

[Pat K]

The whole issue of how much maintenance needs to be done is so site specific. We can really get into trouble trying to get a formula. With the variability of sites being different for every layout and even the differences on a single layout it's impossible. I have some sandy soil but mostly heavy marine clay soil. They both get treated differently. I used just over 6 million gallons of water last year for 22 tennis courts, 30 acres of fairway, 3 acres of greens and an acre of tee surface. We were still wet. We would have to get a handle on the clubs schedule, soils, lenth of season, dail expectations, the list could go on and on before we could determine " how much maintenance. I know that what was possible at Essex twelve years ago with 10,000 rounds is no longer possible with our play being around 20,000 rounds today. Sooooooo, it's all an excercise in an imaginary word otherwise.

[Craig Sweet]

So the answer to the question "How often does a course need to be maintained", is only as often as the members find acceptable.

Or is it only as often as need to maintain healthy condiditons?

Or is it, whatever the budget will allow?

[Pat Brockwell]

At Black Mesa GC, 5600' above the sea, 6.5 million gallons gets me less than 2weeks irrigation during the heat of summer.  Over the last two years (post grow in) I have applied 50" of water annually.  God gave us less than 10"/yr and half of that was snowfall. The course has stayed firm and if I don't put some water out every night we can get hurt.  I just try to follow heavy cycles with light ones and take every opportunity to cut back, but whenever the turf asks (purple) we had better deliver.  The bent on the greens has a very short window between wilt and permanent wilt when the temps are above 85 and the relative humidity is in single digits and the high altitude solar index is off the sunscreen chart. I have not been able to make this course soggy yet.  So I guess the answer to the question is, again, it depends!