Royal and Ancient and Wet Wilt

At Stillmeadow Country Club we hosted our member/guest tournament, also known as the Royal and Ancient, this past weekend.  I would like to say that as the turf and maintenance department is concerned, we were very discouraged that we were not able to deliver the type of playability that we wanted due to unforeseen weather events.  I can assure you that it was sickening for us to work for 3-4 weeks in preparation of the tournament only to have it all removed from our control after a total of 4 inches of rain on the first two days of the event along with a windstorm that peppered the course with tree debris.  All that we can hope is that everyone noticed that we worked very hard to deliver the best course conditions that we were able to deliver.


The other thing I would like to discuss related to our change in weather is the event we are experiencing on our greens known as wet wilt.  Wet wilt is when the natural defense mechanisms of the turf plants shut down due to the lack of oxygen in the soil profile thanks to the excess water caused from rain events or over watering. Ours has been caused from the excess rainfall that occurred last weekend.  Other contributing factors to wet wilt are high soil temperatures which we have also experienced as of late and high humidity which keeps the soil from drying quickly.  The main function of the turf plant that is restricted is the plants ability to cool itself through transpiration.  This problem will always be an issue on a few of our greens thanks to poor drainage on our soil greens.  Wet wilt is capable of occurring almost anywhere but is definitely prominent in areas of poor drainage and areas of where poa annua is heavily populated.  Our low lying areas that drain poorly on greens have both of these issues.


Our plan to reduce the severity of damage is to vent the greens.  We plan to do this a couple of different ways.  The first procedure that we have already accomplished was to spike the greens.  Spiking greens is very noninvasive to playability but drastically helps to get some air into the top inch to two inches of the greens soil profiles.  Next, we plan to go a step further by aerating all of the troubled areas with 1/4" needle tines to get more air further down into the profile.  We also plan to reduce mowing/rolling frequency as well as raising the mowing heights a touch.  Yes, this will mean slower putts!  We have made leaps and bounds of progress on our course in the 8 short months that we have been here and we don't plan to takes steps backwards now.  If we have normal late August and September weather, we should only be talking about a few weeks of slightly slower green speeds.


If you would like to read more about wet wilt I would encourage you to read the following USGA sponsored article at  http://gsr.lib.msu.edu/2000s/2006/060307.pdf


Here are a few pictures of the start of our greens with wet wilt