The Green Game

by Bart Potter

In today’s lesson in golf science we pay a visit to Gwen Stahnke, for whom a normal day’s work might include waiting on Koch’s postulates to play out.

Koch’s postulates, as we all know, are four criteria designed to establish a causal relationship between a microbe and a disease. In this case, the microbe is pythium, and the test subject is healthy grass from a local putting green.

In a nutshell (or Petrie dish, if you prefer), if the pythium infects the healthy grass, then Stahnke, a turfgrass scientist at the WSU Extension in Puyallup, will know it’s a strain of cool-weather pythium that’s been damaging the poa annua greens around the region.

In all seriousness, this obscure terminology represents serious science. And pythium blight is a deadly serious subject in the world of golf course superintendents.

“Pythium is known as a warm-weather disease, but over the past couple years a (once) weak strain of pythium is now fairly destructive,” Justin Ruiz, superintendent atOlympia’s Indian Summer Golf and Country Club, wrote in an email recently.

Ruiz estimates some 24 golf course superintendents are dealing with pythium blight.

“Some have lost their jobs, and others are hanging on,” Ruiz wrote.

Ruiz and Indian Summer are taking part in a wetting agent study to see if “moving the water through the profile” (science talk again) will help with the infection.

What’s happening, according to WSU’s Stahnke, is a perfect storm of plant pathology.

The extended hot summer of 2009, when temperatures stayed near 100 degrees F. much longer than typical west of the Cascades,  then stayed warmer at night, caused supers to water more than usual just to keep the greens going.

The hot summer gave way to a cold 2010 winter, which did its own damage.

This winter was cold and wet, and the extended wet spring has done its part. Stahnke and her clients in superintendents’ offices at first didn’t recognize the yellowish fungal blooms on the greens as pythium.

Not every fungicide works on every fungus, so it was not as simple as point-and-shoot.

“What happened was it just hung in there,” Stahnke said. “It had nothing to do with what any one superintendent did.”

At clubs where the members are particularly demanding, pythium has become less a question of horticultural science than job security.

Particularly at private courses, club members are more demanding than ever of superintendents. Members see tournaments on TV where the Stimpmeter rolls at 12 or 13 feet, and they want their greens that fast all the time, Stahnke said.

Grass isn’t designed to be kept that short, and that puts extra stress on greens that are already compromised.

So the challenge, for Stahnke and her clientele, is to show that this is a virulent infectious disease and not neglect by superintendents.

Which brings us back to Koch’s postulates, first published by Robert Koch in 1890. He used the test to determine the causes of anthrax and tuberculosis, and the postulates have since been applied to many other diseases.

Including, in 2011, pythium blight.

 

by Bart Potter

IT WOULD BE easy to assume that everything in the care and feeding of Chambers Bay Golf Course – its maintenance, management and mindset – is all about the U.S. Amateur, in the near term, and the U.S. Open, in the not-so-distant future.

But it was a golf course before it was a championship venue, and it was a recovered habitat before it was a golf course.

The vision of Chambers Bay’s founders and builders, from the very beginning of planning, absolutely included creating a golf course worthy of major championships.

But an equal priority was a commitment to environmental stewardship that was in place long before the United States Golf Association came calling with its two biggest events.

“The concept, from the very inception, was to be unique, distinctive and very high-caliber,” saidChambersBaysuperintendent Dave Wienecke, “to stand alone, nationally and internationally.”

Chambers Bay is the only golf course in the Northwest to be a certified member of the Audubon Signature Program, the highest level of environmental certification by Audubon International. It is one of only 88 properties in the U.S. (many, but not all, of which are golf courses) to earn the distinction.

Pierce County, the owner ofChambers Bay, was insistent from the start on being environmentally responsible with its golf course project, partly because it recognized its public relations value, Wienecke said.

“And it appears they genuinely wanted to do the right thing,” he said.

It started, for Chambers Bay, with the very first hire by Kemper Sports, the company Pierce Countybrought in to manage the course. That first hire was Wienecke.

He wasn’t ready to leave his previous job just yet, but Kemper said, Hey, we need you right now.

So he jumped right into the job at Chambers Bay, one important part of which was tending to the “very stringent” requirements for a partnership with Audubon.

Wienecke came on board in July 2006 when the course was about 20 percent built on the reclaimed site of the former Glacier/Lone Star Northwest Gravel Mine.

“It was a very special site,” Wienecke said. “That played into it.”

Audubon specifications, at minimum, call for establishing a natural resource management plan that includes protecting wildlife and their habitats during and after construction, safeguarding water quality and regulating water use, and cultivating turfgrass and other plant life suitable for an ecological region.

Audubon is very clear that a Signature-certified property must not just meet but exceed the minimums and maintain the strict standards going forward.

“People think you can either be environmentally friendly, or be a championship golf course, but not be both,” Wienecke said. “It’s fun for us that we are both.”

More with less

Wienecke, an agronomist by training, broke into the golf turfgrass industry in the 1970s, when many superintendents had no formal science education and learned the job on the job.

There had been some environmental awakening by this time – Wienecke credits Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” for opening eyes and minds – but around golf courses, change was slow.

“People really thought you could control Mother Nature,” Wienecke said.

A typical 1960s guideline for nitrogen fertilizer was to apply a pound of fertilizer every three to four weeks, which means 14-17 pounds a year. These days, Wienecke uses no more than two pounds a year.

He waters less, with better results. Specifically, he waters less often but more heavily and deeply, then induces “drought stress,” which means letting the grass dry out almost to the point of wilting before watering again. The result is denser, stronger roots.

“You can have high-quality turf with a fraction of the irrigation,” Wienecke said, “and it’s healthier.”

by Bart Potter

IT’S THE ONLY mnemonic device I’ve ever remembered.

In case you’ve forgotten, a mnemonic* device is a trick to help you remember. One of the most famous (unless I’ve forgotten) is ROY G BIV. The great Roy G. Biv. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet … in that order.

Of all the colors of the rainbow that might announce themselves on a golf course, Roy’s middle initial is the one that will always be first and foremost.

Green trees. Green grass. Green fairways. The green.

Golf is green. But is it “green”?

This column isn’t long enough to be a comprehensive exploration of the environmental health and responsibility of golf courses. Scientists, weigh in if you feel like it.  What seems clear is that golf courses are aware of the wonderful natural resources they can be.

And, far from having their heads in the bunker, they are tuned to the public mood that says they ought to be “green” as well as just green.

David Weinecke, superintendent at ChambersBay, and Chris Goodman, superintendent and manager at Meadow Park Golf Course inTacoma, were part of a recent presentation to a gathering of golf media at ChambersBay. The theme was golf and the environment.

Weinecke and Goodman both say much the same thing: Because their grass is green and their courses look great and inviting and groomed, they hear from a sector of the (usually non-golf) population that they surely must be dumping tons of fertilizer and pesticides on their courses and wasting gallons of precious water.

“If it wasn’t so frustrating, it would almost be comical,” says Chuck Denney, director of parks and recreation for the city of Tumwater, which operates Tumwater Valley Golf Course.

Much closer to the truth is that golf courses do far less damage to the environment than the aggregate of the homeowner who can buy as much fertilizer as he wants for his 1,200-square-foot lawn and apply as much of it as he wants as often as he wants – and water it and water it and water it.

His lawn looks great, it’s all legal, and it’s leaching into the groundwater.

Weinecke cites a statistic that says golf courses represent 5 percent of water use. The other 95 percent isn’t all homeowners, obviously, but it’s the biggest chunk.

Goodman, whose theme at his course is “Bringing the meadows back toMeadow Park,” is embarked on a program that has added 20 acres of non-play, non-maintained land – more than double the previous acreage. Similarly, Tumwater has taken nearly 20 acres of mowed areas out of active maintenance and planted native trees and shrubs to enhance wildlife habitat.

On any given day at Tumwater, Denney says, you might see deer, ducks, Canada geese, red-tail hawks, blue herons, coyotes, rabbits, beaver, river otters, owls and a variety of other wildlife that live on or around  the course.

Weinecke says among the 35 species of birds atChambersBayare hawks, owls and bald eagles.

“You don’t see that in an unhealthy ecosystem,” he says.

Weinecke says he goes three to 10 days between watering. And the water, he says, is cleaner when it leaves the course than when it arrives.

Goodman is watering less, fertilizing less, mowing less – and living with the different textures. Esthetically, Goodman likes most – not necessarily all – of the results.

“In some cases, it takes a slight change of perception,” he says. “Things can be a little rough around the edges, and maybe it’s slightly better for the environment.

“It can make the canvas a little more interesting.”

The Western Washington Golf Course Superintendents Association, of which Weinecke and Goodman are members, has an active environmental program. Organizations like The National Audubon Society, First Green and Salmon Safe (each worthy of a golf-related column in its own right) are partnering with the golf industry to further environmental aims.

There are other sides to this story. There is room for plenty more dialogue (right here in this space) about what golf courses are doing – and not doing – to be green around the greens.

As for Roy G., he had a cup of coffee on the Sherwin-Williams tour. Sprayed it all over the spectrum. Didn’t stick.

* Derived from Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory.