August 14, 2010

There are more things than heat and drought and subsequent disease that stress turf. One of the other stresses (of many) is trees.

Shade caused by trees filters out light that the turf needs for photosynthesis. With less that an adequate ability to produce sugars, the turf plant can never become healthy or vigorous.

Trees also block air movement which creates stale, humid “air pockets”. Stagnant, humid air is a perfect environment for turf diseases. This is the reason we have fans on the 7th tees.

The unseen problem of trees is their roots. Trees have miles of surface roots that lie just beneath the soil surface and compete with the turf for water and nutrients. Every few years we bring in a specially designed machine to “prune” these roots along the fairway edges, tees, and greens.

Between these machine prunings, we sometimes have to do some areas manually. We use sharp edged flat shovels and push them down as deep as we can through these surface roots along the edges of greens and tees where we notice tree root competition.

We did this manual pruning the other day along the outside edges of 11 approach, 11 green, and 14 green. This pruning will help the approach and these greens to strengthen up.

When it is so dry like it has been, trees can cause a lot of turf damage – their root systems are so much bigger than the turf root systems, and so they can easily out compete turf roots for the soil water.

In this photo of the back of 10 tee, the turf is weak, thinned and then bare due to the tree root competition.