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 As superintendent of a golf course that sees nearly 60,000 rounds a year, Mark Prince knows that to stay ahead of the competition in golf-crazy Horry County, the greens of Burning Ridge Golf Club must stay above par.
Burning Ridge Golf Club assistant superintendent David Victor points to the course’s practice green after treatment for soil water repellency.So in early spring, when Prince and assistant superintendent David Victor noticed large leopard print-like patches appearing on more than half of the course’s greens, they became concerned. Prince’s maintenance staff started hand-watering the greens heavily. It took his small staff two days to water all 18 greens. On the third day they started the process again as the patches returned. The labor-intensive treatment was a drain on their resources. “Hand-watering helped, but it seemed like two days later you were right back putting the fire out again,” Prince said. “It wasn’t curing it.” Then in April, armed with photographs of the affected greens, Prince and Victor attended a turfgrass field day at the Pee Dee Research and Education Center in Florence. They showed the pictures to Clemson University turfgrass expert Dara Park, who immediately recognized the problem. “It was a classic case of soil water repellency,” Park said. Soil water repellency means the soil is hydrophobic. In other words, it doesn’t like water — a bogey if you’re in the golf course maintenance business. Under such conditions, water has a hard time penetrating and moving through the soil uniformly. Instead, water moves to areas where it is allowed. Clemson turfgrass expert Dara Park (right) examines the greens at Burning Ridge Golf Club in Myrtle Beach with superintendent Mark Prince. The condition creates the green and brown areas of the turf: green where there is soil water, brown where there is not. Affected areas can be separated by only a few inches, which creates the leopard pattern. The condition is most common during hotter summer months when greens dry out before the next irrigation is applied, but the Burning Ridge case came earlier in the year. In spring, Bermudagrass breaks dormancy and grows new roots. The new roots were growing in the upper 1 to 1.5 inches of the soil surface, where soil water repellency is most common. Therefore, the roots had no water to take up, which causes the plant to become water-stressed. The greens were still playable, Prince said, but they were beginning to look in poor shape. Park effectively prescribed a medicine for the grass, recommending surface activating agents, or surfactants, to treat the water-repellent soil and to ensure growing roots had water to support the turf. If Prince and Victor hadn’t acted to correct the problem, the greens could have rapidly deteriorated, Park said. “And everyone prefers to play on healthy grass,” she said. By early summer the turf was back to full health and the golf course was saving green. Prince said his staff was spending about 24 hours a week hand-watering. Catching the problem early saved the course about $6,000 in labor costs, Prince said. Further, the course’s water use was almost cut in half after the treatment, Prince said. Some of the water savings could be attributed to increased rainfall during the summer months that replaced scheduled irrigation, Park said. “This is a good example of identifying the problem before going out and using a product,” Park said. “That’s very important, because different conditions require different chemistries to treat them.” (Images provided by Clemson.)
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