The Numbers Don't Lie.....

Putting Surface Smoothness Evaluation

This post would be one that I would classify as a bit more “into the weeds” and for only those curious as to the intricacies of what we do and why, strap in and come along for the ride. If not, hey I understand, we’ll catch you on the next one.

When digging a drainage trench, the advent of the laser level has been an excellent tool. It takes out a good percentage of the human error that could occur using an old builders level and also can be operated by one person. Win Win! Unfortunately though, that laser does not lie. It does not care that you’ve dug a 100’ trench through hard pan clay all day, if you need to dig deeper into that clay for the trench to drain, it will tell you so.

I love our data point collections for the same reason, they don’t lie. Often they tell a great story of improvements and success, but I appreciate just as much when they tell us where we can do better. Over the past couple months we have struggled to keep our greens as smooth as they were in March & April. To be honest it is a pretty simple reason, they are actually growing! While this is of course a necessary and good thing, it brings on more challenges. Most notably what comes with growth at this time of year and poa annua greens is poa seedhead. Now I could just use that excuse and move on but let’s dig a little deeper and go through our data below:

Having a few years of great data now, I can reflect on past years and see where we are currently. A quick run across the columns and you will see average speed and smoothness for each month. Following that is percentage of “Missed Target Days” which are days where we fall below our minimum goals of 10’ for greens speed or <8 on smoothness. This is probably the most important target as is combines both objectives and overall reflects the quality of our putting surfaces. This number excludes days where surfaces are affected by weather, ie heavy rainfall currently or the overnight before. Next you have percentage of days where we exceeded 10’ 6” and were 9 or better on smoothness. Or you could read those as percentage of days we are really, really good!

The blue borders highlighting the yearly averages tell a good story as to how we are improving year to year. Something we will continually strive to do and this article is an example of that.

The red boxes though, show where we are a bit off. While 2024 May & June smoothness numbers are better than 2022, we are behind on 2023. Why is this? Well, I couldn’t tell you exactly, but I have a couple theories and a couple actions we are going to take in hopes of rectifying this going forward.

First off, the “Bobble Test” we use to evaluate greens smoothness, while very useful, it does have a subjective element to it. We train our Team on how to conduct the test and we also have a limited number of people who evaluate and record the data. That aside though, there can be a tendency to be a little less critical from time to time and perhaps that has occurred in some evaluations in the past. I have stressed with the Team this season that I do not want to just see a good number, I want to see the real number. If we are a 7/10 I need to know! We will change practices for the next day, or coming days, in order to get ourselves where we need to be. I suspect that this direction to be more critical has yielded slightly lower numbers for us this year. I’m good with that, now we can figure out how to fix it.

Secondly, as mentioned above we are dealing with poa seedhead. The plant protrudes the seed up high and as we are not 100% covered in poa plants going to seed, this can create an untrue surface sometimes resembling a plinko board as opposed to a putting surface. I mention the lack of 100% coverage as we have annual poa going to seed, more perennial types of poa not going to seed, old penncross bentgrass that the greens were seeded to 30 years ago, and also new bentgrass that we have begun overseeding into greens. This mixed stand of surfaces creates challenges when trying to create one smooth putting surface.

As you may be aware, we have not performed a traditional core aeration on greens for a few years now. Through our organic matter testing program we have thus far concluded that we can manage our organic matter levels by judiciously managing our nitrogen applications (main growth controlling nutrient), and completing regular light sand top dressings to dilute & help break down organic matter accumulation that occurs naturally as a turfgrass plant grows. This is great as we can avoid major disruptions to the playing surface and give you better greens, more days of the year. The trade off is that we schedule a light top dressing every three weeks which does lead to minor disruptions. We see smoothness levels fall slightly for 1-3 days following these light top dress applications. This program presents another challenge as we almost always have sand in the very top of our turf canopy. In order to manipulate the multiple types of grass we have into one smooth surface, we need to perform practices like grooming, vertical mowing and brushing to stand up all the grass types, train them to grow more upright, and cut them all at a uniform length. Unfortunately these grooming practices also bring up that sand that is near the top of the canopy and it goes through our nice sharp cutting reels. As you can imagine, reels do not stay sharp very long when they are cutting sand, like not even a few greens.

So lets grow less grass, so we can put down less sand, so we can have better greens on more days of the year. It actually is kind of really that simple! We know what greens have higher organic matter, this organic matter contains nitrogen that as organic matter breaks down is released to the plant. These higher organic matter greens also grow a bit more and guess what, they are our bumpiest greens. Mostly the front 9 (#2-#7) that not coincidentally also get more sunlight, which you guessed it, grows more grass. We have always treated greens as all getting a baseline of nitrogen, and then adding more nitrogen to greens that we need a little more growth on. Just last week we did our first greens nitrogen application skipping numerous front 9 greens, applying a baseline to others, and even doubling up on a few that we want more growth on. Hopefully this will lead to less growth & more smoothness on the offending greens. This is action one.

The second part of the equation is this sand that is getting in the way of grooming. As we know exact amounts of organic matter levels on each green, we have designed a top dressing program that puts more or less sand on each green to counteract this accumulation. We have decided that we can skip the next top dressing due in a couple weeks and make up this application in the winter months. Why not have great greens in July and sacrifice a little during the November rains?!?!

Backing off on our summer top dressing will allow for more grooming and in theory, a better, more smooth putting surface. This is action two.

Okay, so that was a long winded explanation I know. In the end though I wanted to show that if you are seeing greens not as great, we are too, and we have a plan to get them to where we want them to be. Should we be successful in the remainder of this year, this is something we will look to implement starting in May of next year ahead of the dreaded poa seedhead season. If you made it this far, thanks for sticking it out and I’ll be sure to update on this topic later in the season.