Watering Practices and Course Update

I have been asked by several home owners over the last week or so how they should be watering their lawns. As the price of water is going up and the availability of water is going down I thought it might be a good idea to try and help everyone out a little bit with what I consider my own opinion the best watering practices. You have probably heard people say that deep and infrequent is the way to water. This is very true and really starts to show up this time of year. In my opinion homeowners should not be watering their yard anymore then three times a week during the extreme heat and then during the cooler periods to back that down to once or twice a week depending on weather conditions. The key is too run your sprinklers for longer periods of time less days during the week. I would suggest running your big rotor heads around 20-30 minutes each time and your mist heads around 10-15 minutes. The mist heads put down a lot more water at one time so it is important to back those down or you will be putting too much water down. You can then decide how many days to run your system depending on the weather. But like I said I would suggest to limit it too 2-3 days a week. This will help your turfgrass establish roots and will help it withstand the warmer temperatures along with helping you cut down on disease pressure and your water bill. One other way you can save water is to put your systems in rain shutdown when it rains. You don't know how many times I am driving around the golf course right after or during a rain and I see homeowners lawns still watering. This week has been a great week here at Creekmoor. We have been able to get a lot accomplished and got somewhat caught up after the heat. These rains we got were much needed and helped the golf course recover a little bit after the warm temperatures. Yesterday we verticutt the greens and today we did the tees. We are trying to help eliminate the puffiness and help improve our water infiltration rates along with helping the turf to breathe. We also were able to get back onto our normal mowing schedule somewhat. We also applied a fungicide to greens and tees today to help prevent disease from forming during the warmer stretch of weather that is ahead. After the little rains we had this week the turf may surge a little bit over the weekend so we will be busy next week getting caught back up. It looks like the temperatures are forecasted next week to once again start to rise into the mid to upper 90's. I am going to keep my fingers crossed that the humidity stays so that everything doesn't dry out as fast. I hope everyone has a great weekend.

My assistant Juan on the verticutter on #5 tees

#2 tee after verticutter went over it

Thatch accumulation on tees after we verticutt