B
rent Graham, the
course superinten-
dent for the Two Riv-
ers Country Club in
Williamsburg, had a
simple explanation
for the seemingly
countless weath-
er-related travails
he and many of his
colleagues all around
Virginia have faced in a memorable, and often
miserable, 2018.
“It’s been a year of extremes,” Graham said.
“Extreme heat, extreme cold. Extremely wet and
extremely dry. Seems like we went right from
winter into summer, and now, we’ve gone right
from summer to winter. In my 13 years, it’s been
the most difficult time I’ve ever seen.”
From south to north, east to west and all points
in between, growing, mowing and maintaining
grass for tees, greens, fairways and rough—wheth-
er Bermuda, Bent, Bluegrass, Zoysia or Fescue—
has been a major challenge all around. In some
places, those challenges were occasionally cat-
astrophic, though not entirely insurmountable.
Despite the year’s weather extremes, superinten-
dents around the Commonwealth found ways to
keep their courses open and playable.
Consider Tuscarora Country Club in Danville,
an 18-hole venue that opened in 1957.
After a colder-than-normal winter, a tornado
hit the golf course in April, taking out 65 trees,
many of them located in strategic spots that often
came into play. Broken tree limbs and all manner
of debris was scattered everywhere.
As if the summer hadn’t been wet enough, in
September, they were pounded by rain from the
outer bands of hurricanes Michael and Florence.
That caused significant flooding that washed all
the sand out of their bunkers, wreaked havoc
with saturated greens and destroyed a cart path.
And because it was so wet, many areas could not
be mowed, and rough almost became unplayable.
“We have Mini Verde Bermuda greens,” said
Steve Nixon, Tuscarora’s general manager and
head professional. “In January, we had a 20-day
span where we had single digit, low teens tem-
peratures every night. We lost 18 greens, 12 of
them really badly. It was kind of wild. In April, the
Bermuda was still dormant and we couldn’t really
tell until May how bad the winter kill was.”
The bottom line: Tuscarora had to close down
in June and July, re-opened in August and some-
how survived the hurricane flooding. In mid-Oc-
tober, Nixon said, “We’re almost back to 100
percent. Right now, our greens are probably in
the best shape they’ve ever been since we put
them in seven years ago. Our fairways general-
ly did OK. If you played today
OBrent Graham and his
and you had tried to play three
border collie Duff at Two
Rivers Country Club.
months ago, you wouldn’t even
recognize the place.”
Nixon said the greens came virtually all the way
back during an intense 90-day period of constant
care that included repeated aeration procedures,
also known as sprigging, that involved taking plugs
from out of the non-damaged portions of greens
and placing them in the bad areas. They did that
three different times starting at the end of May
and continuing through the third week in July.
“It really worked just like we hoped it would,”
Nixon said, adding that there clearly were some
lessons learned last year, particularly after that
early winter freezing cold snap. “If it gets to be 20
degrees or below, we’ll start putting pine straw
over the top and cover it with tarps, which just
adds another layer of insulation. We’ve also pur-
chased some new gauges that will let us know how
wet the soil is, and if it gets too dry, we will hand
water them if we have to. We don’t mind snow, but
that cold spell really hurt us.”
Further north, at The Gauntlet Golf Club in Fred-
ericksburg, a public fee course designed by P.B. Dye,
first-year course owner Mike Byrd faced another sort
of obstacle in June caused by excessive moisture,
heat and humidity. It was the dreaded Pythium
blight on all his greens “and that stuff is like a shark,
it can take out a green in 24 to 48 hours,” Byrd said.
Pythium blight is also known as “grease spot”
and “cottony blight” and can be a highly destruc-
tive turf disease, especially on bent grasses and rye
grasses. Severe outbreaks can completely destroy
the grass within a few days if weather conditions
favor disease development.
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