The weather this week has provided an excellent opportunity to complete our tee and fairway granular fertilization.

Given the large area of treatable turf we have here at Stow Acres, this process is completed using a PTO spreader mounted on our New Holland TC33D turf tractor. As always, we do things a bit differently here at Stow. Rather than use a pulley and rope, or lever setup to open the hopper and start spreading the fertlizer, we’re using a 12V linear actuator and controller to operate the gate. This allows us to control the rate exactly and make minute adjustments as the fertilizer is applied. It also ensures that the gate is opened at the exact same speed each time, providing a controlled gradiant of applied product at the beginning and end of each pass.

The controller allows for three different positions: Position 1 is for the gate closed, and Positions 2 and 3 are reserved for two different application rates.

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The black segregation that you may have noticed on the tees is a weed known as green kyllinga. In just the last 10 years, this has become a highly problematic weed in turfgrass in the Mid-Atlantic region. If left untreated the kyllinga will spread quickly and requires costly renovations to control. Even then, there is no guarantee that you will fully eliminate the weed.

We use a combination of products to keep the kyllinga from spreading. The black that you are seeing is the weed several days after a herbicide application. We will continue these applications throughout the summer to continue eradicating the problem.

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It may seem odd after that much rain in April and May but the golf courses are VERY dry and it shows. The South fairways in particular are struggling although, this is temporary. We were obligated to mow them last week when they were still a bit soft and that resulted in some scalping.

Scalping occurs when you mow off most of the leaf tissue and below the growing point of the plant. Not good. We raised the mowing height on fairways until we get through this stretch of weather and until the turf recovers, maybe next week.

The greens are doing fine, the annual bluegrass seed heads have died, turned brown and will soon disappear.

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On Wednesday we made our first application of iron and growth regulators to the putting surfaces and tees. The ninth green was the last to be sprayed and I came up about 10 gallons short of finishing. This left a portion of the ninth green looking dark from the iron while the rest of the green remained much lighter in color.

Since this spray did not contain anything absolutely essential to plant health, I decided to leave portions of the ninth green unsprayed. A "test plot" as my former boss, Superintendent of Town & Country Club Bill Larson, used to call it. After we spray we often look for results and say the "iron did this or the growth regulator did that." However, without an untreated area to measure against, our comparisons are less accurate. Over the next couple of weeks we will be able to see, side-by-side, exactly what affect our spray has on the turf.

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