Winter Preparation Golf Club de Sierre Switzerland

Jean-Bernard Mittaz

Golf Course Superintendent
Golf Club de Sierre
Valais, Switzerland
www.golfsierre.ch

Our golf course is down at the bottom of the Rhône Valley at the altitude
of 546 m. in Valais, Switzerland

Our greens preparation for the winter starts at the end of September. We do a scarification of the greens with a Graden machine at the maximum depth to remove the thatch. A good top-dressing with sand and peat will follow that work. We then raise our height of cut to 5 mm (0.19 in.).

Three weeks later, we do a hollow coring followed by top dressing and use some Potassium. We raise the height of cut to 6 mm (0.23 in.).

Late September: Start fungicide preventive applications

September/ October: Application of Heritage.

November: Application of Switch (Cyprodinil/fludioxonil)

Just before the snow, we apply Switch again.

Winter Greens Preperation Springbank Links Golf Club

John Faber

Superintendent
Springbank Links Golf Club
Calgary, Alberta
www.springbanklinks.com

Golf Season: 3rd week of April – 3rd week of Oct
Summer: July/Aug 30C is common
Winter: may or may not have snow cover, potential for -30C, high winds common, weather phenomenon called Chinooks (warm winds from Pacific coast could bring temps up to 20C)

Winter preparation starts with a fungicide application on the greens near the end of September to clear up any existing disease pressures and begin preparing the turf for winter. Applications of fertilizers with a high potassium content are also applied to prepare the turf (2 liquids, 1 granular) from mid September to mid October.
This year we are going to try an application of a wetting agent to hold moisture near the surface and crown through the winter months. With the high winds we can experience, desiccation is a major concern.

Once the course is closed, one final application of fungicide is applied to give us protection through the winter months and early spring. Also new this year is an application of an anti-desiccant to coat the leaf blade and surface. This will be followed by a heavy topdressing to again protect the surface, and the final step is covering the greens with an permeable tarp. I have several greens which are predominantly poa annua; which will also get an impermeable tarp with a bubble wrap backing to protect them for extreme cold temperatures.

Winter Greens Preparation Redwood Meadows Golf and Country Club

Heath Koch

Golf Course Superintendent (C.G.S.A)
Redwood Meadows Golf and CC
Bragg Creek, Alberta, Canada
www.redwoodmeadows.com

We are located about 15 minutes west of Calgary in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Our greens are Poa Annua and Pencross creeping bentgrass mix. (55/45) We get a good amount of snow fall that will stay on the course from around the start of November till the end of April. With our location we get a number of Chinooks throughout the winter months that can bring our temperatures up from -10C to +15C over night. This causes a lot of problems with freeze thaw cycles that we need to be very careful with.

Around the beginning of September the heights of our greens will start being raised. We will go from .100 to about .120 around the middle to end of September and our first fungicide application will be applied. Greens heights will get up around the .16 or so to end out the season.

During this time we supplement our greens cutting with rolling almost every day. Throughout the month of September the greens heights are continually being raised till around the 2nd week in October when the mowing slows down significantly. We will then only roll daily and mow 1-2 times per week to pickup pine needles, leaves, and lose debris off the greens. By now we are experiencing frost on a regular if not daily basis keeping us off the greens most days till around 11:00am. By the middle of October we have blown all the water from our irrigation system and our now only hand watering greens as required. We are now watching the weather and will put down our final application of fungicide and our topdressing will also take place. At this time we will wait till weather looks like things are going to stay cool and cold and just prior we will start our tarping process.

Tarping:
My tarping system consists of bubble wrap and a solid tarp.
-Bubble Wrap- 10mm 1 inch bubbles 12 ft x 100 ft rolls
-Various solid impermeable tarps.

In order to keep the freeze thaw cycles to a minimum we use a system where we put down a heavy topdressing then bubble wrap then a solid tarp. This also keeps any moisture off the green throughout the winter making sure that we don’t see any ice directly on the turf. Once the turf has hardened off and is relatively frozen we start by unrolling the bubble wrap and stapling it directly to the turf (bubble side down) after this we lay our solid tarps over top. These tarps must go over the surrounds on all the high sides in order to prevent water from making its way under the tarping system. These tarps are nailed down every 1 ½ ft with 12 inch spikes and washers on top. The tarp is pulled tight and where two tarps are needed and we lay them like shingles so as to keep water running off the lower sides.

Our greens at Redwood Meadows have some low areas that in the past have experienced significant winter kill. With the bubble wrap applied and the tarps in place any moistures from melting episodes throughout the year is kept on top the tarp on top the bubble wrap. The bubble wrap acts as a insulating layer and with the bubbles facing downward it provides pockets for air and gases to enter and exit. This new tarping system had proven to be a very beneficial tool in keeping our green alive throughout our strange and tough winters.

If you would like to see more photos or learn more about tarps, please drop me an email. lsharp@tee-2-green.com

Sharing ideas and learning from each other...

In trying to think of new blogs for this site, I always worry that the subjects will be relevant and interesting to a broad spectrum of readers. As a turf professional, I always enjoy visiting with superintendents from all over the world and seeing how they manage their individual turf issues. So I thought I would compile subjects
and share them with readers.

Superintendents have to become innovative in so many ways to deal with their specific turf issues. Some issues may be specific to their region or to that course only. What you will see is that no two superintendents address these issues the same way, and some supers may never face these issues at all.

I feel it’s a valuable resource to share this information so that we can all learn from each other and gain knowledge of what our fellow supers have to endure on a day-to-day basis just to make it through a year.

Examples: Winter prep, water use, affluent water use, dealing with summer heat,
preparing for a major event, interseeding, and other relevant issues.

The first topic I would like to cover is Winter Preparation of Greens.

Please email me subjects you would like to hear more about along with issues you may face at your course that others may find interesting. If you have created or built something that would help a fellow super, feel free to share that also.

Lewis Sharp
lsharp@tee-2-green.com