The Grass is Always Greener:
Summer Course Maintenance
Challenges Arizona's Greenest Thumbs

By Shane Sharp,
Contributing Writer

TUCSON - You are out for your weekly summer round of golf at your favorite local area golf course. It is 105 degrees in the shade and even the cottontail rabbits and prairie dogs have called it a day. For you, the golfer, there is water at every turn. But have you ever noticed how green and true rolling the greens are at your local course, despite heat that no grass should be able to exist in?

Take the time to stop in and thank your local golf course superintendent - the person almost single-handedly responsible for the aesthetic quality of your golfing experience, the unsung hero of the golf course.

If the professional teaching staffs, general managers and directors of golf are the white collar side of the course management equation, the course superintendent is the blue collar leader - the type of person you might expect to bring a lunch pail to work everyday.

But don't be surprised to find you local greens keeper to be as educated as the pretentious lawyer with a locker next to yours at the club. Dave Herman, Director of Greens and Grounds at Heritage Highlands holds what amounts to a masters degree from Rutgers University. Herman's explanation of green maintenance in the summer borders on a description of brain surgery or rocket science.

But then again, you have to be a smart cookie to pull off one of the most unnatural feats of the desert - growing grass in a region where just getting a week to sprout is an accomplishment. And it takes a certain personality to be a successful greens keeper.

Make a few mistakes at your job, and chances are no one will notice. Make a few mistakes with your greens and fairways as a superintendent, and four people every seven minutes notice. And then the next thing you know, a publication like this one finds out and the news that "such and such" course has bad greens is as widespread as the Diamondbacks bandwagon.

Other than the blazing heat, the lack of rain, and the hundreds of hack golfers who don't bother to replace their divots and fix their ball marks, what challenges do superintendents face?

The word on the street in Tucson is that the Golf Club at Vistoso has THE best greens around, and Golf Course Superintendent Terry Todd is largely to thank. A man with a plan, Todd views summers in Tucson as more of a personal challenge than an annoyance.

"As far as watering [the greens], I go deep and infrequent," says Todd. "My greens have slowed down just a little. We go in and try to do a light top dress, and a light verticut - that stands up the grass."

According to Todd, the big issue that golf courses face in the summer in Tucson is what is known in the lexicon of the greenskeeper as puffing.

"This year our ground water has high pH levels, and our nitrates were really hard," says Todd. "I am using an acid injection pump to help. But mine are still getting puffy, so I do a top dressing of sand weekly."

In layman's terms, hot, humid weather leads to unchecked growth of the grass as well as different types of fungi. Specifically, courses that boast bentgrass greens face a much tougher battle than those courses that choose to go with a hardy summertime Bermuda grass than responds more civilly to the heat and humidity.

For years, the Canyon and Mountain Courses at the Lodge at Ventana Canyon have been known for their true rolling bentgrass greens. The daunting task of maintaining these fine dance floors has fallen upon Wally Dowe, Ventana's Director of Golf Course Maintenance.

"Bent is a tough grass to maintain in the summer," explains Dowe. "For one thing, we are on reclaimed water, and you get excess nitrogen and the greens get too lush. We want to back off the nitrogen in the summer. They [the greens] get puffy, and you have to top dress them more with sand to reduce it."

And just as the heat and humidity cause bentgrass to grow faster than a Phoenix subdivision, this dangerous combination also spawns some dreaded fungal enemies.

"There are a lot of things that kind bite you if you are not on your greens daily in the summer," says Todd. "Fairy Ring is common at Vistoso. It thrives off of bad mix in the beginning. It sucks moisture out of the green and creates an isolated dry spot. The fairy ring is the dreaded disease of the desert."

And maintaining greens is only half the battle each summer. According to Dowe, superintendents in Arizona face one of their biggest challenges in transitioning their fairways from rye grass to bermuda grass with the onset of summer.

"Bermuda likes humidity," says Dowe, "and they have a lot of that back east. We find here that when we get into Monsoon season, the Bermuda takes off though."

But just how hard is it to maintain a golf course in Arizona? If it were to arduous an endeavor, golf courses wouldn't dot the landscape as frequently as cactus.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most difficult, Arizona is a 5 or a 6," says Todd. "Heat does not scare me, it is the hot and humid weather that scares me. We have not had any fungal activity yet at Ventana, but it will come."

Todd went on to say that any struggles the summer brings in the desert are more than compensated for by winters that are nearly ideal for the controlled growth of quality turf.

Heritage Highlands' Dave Herman, our aforementioned turf scientist, has his own method of dealing with green maintenance during the scorching southern Arizona summers. And not unlike a trip to the john at the turn, it involves flushing.

"My biggest summertime challenge involves the flushing of the greens," explains Herman. "I don't use ET (evaporative transpiration) on the greens. Through trial and error, we have found out how much water it takes to flush the green."

But just what is flushing. Essentially, Herman and crew flood the greens at Heritage Highlands with exactly 1.9 inches of water. In 40 minutes, the water drains through the green, into a bed of pea gravel and then flushes itself out a 4-inch drainpipe. The result? Deeper rooting and greens that can tolerate extreme daytime temperatures.

"Our roots go down to 12 inches, instead of the standard 10 inches," says Herman.

So the next time you are standing over a three foot put and proceed to push it to the right of the cup, thus losing your five dollar Nassau, tell your playing partners the truth. You were thinking about the ideal flood level for optimal flushing of the green during the summer months in Tucson.

Or if you make the putt, you just may think about splitting your winnings with the local greens keeper. After all, they've earned it.