Cultural Practices for Tees

hi everyone i'm brian ewell the master superintendent of uplands golf club today i'd like to talk about maintenance of golf course tees the golf course t receives some of the largest focused traffic that we see on a golf course people standing at the t blocks hitting their shots and walking off in this particular case we're on the first tee and as you can see the wear patterns that we've got here in the first tee after five months of play and traffic there's really nothing left of this tea the grass doesn't grow for five months in the winter time and this wear will continue to decline the tea over throughout the winter your first tee especially on any golf course probably receives three to four times the normal amount of traffic as players are standing on the t longer waiting for the group to tee off practice swinging chipping you name it in our case we get 69 000 rounds a year and that's a lot of traffic now that's compounded by people standing on the tee and this wear pattern starts to increase we're into the last weeks of april now and this is a time that we start to perform cultural practices but before i talk about the cultural practices let's talk a little bit about tea design back in the early 1980s we didn't have these large tea decks here we used to put out the rubber mats on a wood frame and that's where golfers played for five months during the winter time when grass wasn't growing so in the early 1980s uplands golf club designed these large runway tees they're called a runway basically much like a runway of an airport these are large expansive areas that we could distribute traffic over a given area in the mid 1990s we wanted to have some more yardage options so we started to add some satellite tees which at that time were our forward tees at about 5500 yards and then most recently we had the united states golf association come to the golf course do a turf consultation and from there they discussed swing speeds we didn't have that technology back then to test people's swing speeds but now that we know female players and aging male players their swing speeds are 60 miles per hour the average male players swing speeds are 81 to 90 miles per hour and from that knowledge we decided to add an additional forward set of tees now at about 47 to 4 900 yards so we're seeing some changes in t deck designs and locations actually one of their great recommendations they had was all golfers test their swing speeds and then you match your swing speed to the t-block color so we know that we're playing the right t distance and also having fun besides traffic wear growing conditions can be another problem for a golf course tee in this case we're on the third hole here and the design of this key is to put it along the road and have players hid away from the road into a safe area down on the fairway but being located on the right hand side here we have a large wall of fir trees and it blocks the morning sunlight it's almost one o'clock in the afternoon now and this tea is finally starting to get a little bit of sunlight it won't be till three or four o'clock in the afternoon that we start getting full sunlight in this case because of the lack of sunlight we can see the amount of wear and damage on this key because the turf doesn't stand up very well we use an application called sun seeker that will show the different angles of the sun at different times of the year and we can see what the growing conditions and challenges are so the next and final phase of our golf course team maintenance is our cultural practices after a winter of traffic poor growing conditions lack of sunlight we need to improve our golf course tees and the final piece of the puzzle is cultural practices so we do a few different things in order to improve our our condition of our t's one of the first things that we need to do is identify what is currently going on in this case i took a profile of our 6t here and you can see we have this layer on the top here called thatch it's not too bad it's diluted but it's a layer of decaying organic material leaf tissues and roots and this buildup creates soft conditions secondly what you see in this profile is these broken pieces are bricks of soil this is compaction this limits air and water movement and also root development in this profile here so we need to fix that so the first step that we do is incorporate vertical mowing this is a tractor with a vertical mower with blades that slice vertically into the ground and we'll blanket this entire t with a vertical mower and once completed there'll be a large amount of organic debris sitting on the top the crew will blow this together and then off load it into a compost pile and reuse it in other places on the golf course but we remove almost a dump truck load of this organic material off of each tee so a lot of material comes out the second cultural practice that we do after the vertical mowing is aeration we have two choices either solid time which punches a hole in or core aeration that removes a core in our case we're going to use solid tines that punches a hole into the t-top that allows air and water to move in and this creates a great opportunity to incorporate new seed to repair the teas from wear and traffic so what we do is we spread perennial rye grass all over the tee and the perennial rye grass will not only go in the holes but it also go in those verticut lines so it creates an ideal seed bed and get a great seed take with perennial rye grass which is fast growing usually germinates in about seven to ten days and you know 15 to 20 degree celsius weather and once we've laid the seed down the final step is to top dress with sand as we remember in some of my previous videos sand is a non-compactable growing medium it's like a having marbles in a bucket no matter how hard you step on it you can't get the marbles any closer together so by putting sand into this profile it creates pore space for air and water to move through this profile and overall conditions will improve in the coming months so these are some of the things that we do to improve our tea conditions we perform this practice usually in the spring and fall and we're looking good looking good for the year and get the teas in great shape for everyone happy golfing everyone you

Channel: Turf Tips with Brian Youell

Views: 2,913

Keywords:

Id: ryoNgQ8NFfs

Length: 7min 8sec (428 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022