what can a superintendent do to minimize a frost delay
How much damage frost actually causes a golf game course (and your yard), according to a golf-course superintendent
Frost delays have long sent golfers back to their cars.
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Welcome to Super Secrets, a GOLF.com serial in which we selection the brains of the game'due south leading superintendents. By illuminating how course maintenance crews ply their trades, we're hopeful nosotros tin can not but give you a deeper appreciation for the important, innovative work they do but as well provide you with maintenance tips that you tin use to your own petty patch of paradise. Happy gardening!
Neither rain nor estrus nor gloomy looks from disapproving spouses tin keep avid golfers from their appointed rounds. Just frost! Frost will do information technology. When it forms on courses, it often ways delays.
But what's the deal with frost? When and where is information technology most probable to appear? What issues does it pose? How do superintendents deal with it? And what, if anything, should homeowners do near it in their yards?
Rick Tegtmeier is a Certified Golf Course Superintendent and Main Greenkeeper (not many people have earned both titles). He's also the director of grounds at the Des Moines Golf & State Gild, in Iowa, which hosted the 2017 Solheim Loving cup.
Given where he works, Tegtmeier has plenty of experience with frost. We asked him for the cold, difficult facts.
1. It doesn't have to exist freezing for frost to course
Frost typically forms on turf over the grade of chilly nights when the grass itself gets colder than the surrounding air. Any number of factors help create those atmospheric condition. Patently sometime temperature, of form, but also dew points, wind speeds, humidity and cloud encompass. And then there's the biggie: Wet Bulb temperature, which, every bit Tegtmeier puts information technology, "is the temperature air cools to when you add together water to the equation." You know how the air feels colder when yous lick your finger and hold information technology out? Same thing happens when grass gets wet. The surface temperature of the found drops to the Wet Bulb temperature. If it drops low plenty, frost can form (all the more likely in shaded or lower-lying areas of the grade), even if the air temperature hasn't plunged below 32F.
two. It's always coldest before the dawn
How to winterize your lawn, according to a golf-course superintendent
That poetic-sounding saying is grounded in scientific fact. When the sun goes downward, the earth starts cooling off and continues doing so until the sun comes up again. Tegtmeier and his crew are mindful of this when they caput out on their pre-dawn maintenance shifts, knowing that the frost-less course they first encounter might become a frosty course while they're in the middle of their work. "We've definitely gotten caught out there by frost," Tegtmeier says. "It's not there when we go started, but it forms while we're out there." When that happens, they'll turn to other tasks, such as edging cart paths or tending mulch beds, that don't involve treading or riding over frosty turf.
3. The clearer the night, the frostier the dawn
You've probably noticed that frost delays are more than mutual after clear, well-baked nights. That's because clouds trap rut, warming the atmosphere. If it's overcast at night, you've got a better chance of existence in the clear for your early morning tee fourth dimension. If, on the other manus, the air is crisp and you can see the stars, don't be shocked if you're delayed by frost on your course at dawn.
iv. What'southward the impairment?
That depends on a range of factors, including the varietal of turf, the wellness of the grass, the severity of the frost and corporeality of activity the frosty turf endures. But hither's the gist: When grass gets frosted over, the water in its institute cells can freeze and expand. If yous mow that grass in its frigid state (or bruise on it, or ride your cart across information technology), those icy molecules can shatter. That's not broken drinking glass. It's broken grass. That doesn't mean y'all've killed the turf, which, in virtually cases, will recover. But you tin can see the impact presently after in discoloration. "I don't want to say it'south merely an aesthetic event, because you can obviously do some structural damage to the plant," Tegtmeier says. "But almost often the impact is visual." That impact is more readily apparent in the longer grass of the rough, Tegtmeier says. Information technology's as well more obvious when the damage is caused in early flavor frosts, in, say, late September or October, when the grass is still delicious and growing, and the discrepancy between healthy and unhealthy turf is clearer. It's much less apparent afterward in the season, when the turf has started going dormant.
As a general rule, Tegtmeier says, if in that location's frost on the ground at Des Moines State Lodge, golfers are not allowed on the course. "Of form, if it's merely a tiny patch in the shade of a tree somewhere, we'll but ask the golfers non to drive or walk through it," Tegtmeier says. "We effort to allow common sense prevail."
But many other courses are looser with the rules, allowing golfers out in frosty weather, most likely because they demand the greens fees. "The operator might just decide, I'd rather deal with the frost impairment than lose the revenue," Tegtmeier says.
five. How to deal with frost at domicile
Back in the proficient old days, when print was king, Tegtmeier could tell from the discolored footprints in his neighbors' yards that the newspaper boy or girl had trampled on the grass when it was frosty. Not the end of the world. But if it's not something yous want, you could employ a superintendent'due south trick and spray your lawn lightly with a hose. Maintenance crews sometimes exercise that to become frost off a green, Tegtmeier says. But for a homeowner, he adds, that's pretty much just a waste of water. "It'southward non like you need to use your backyard for revenue," he says. "You're amend off doing what virtually of us do at the golf course and just expect for the sun to come up and the frost to cook away."
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Source: https://golf.com/lifestyle/how-much-damage-frost-really-causes-a-golf-course-and-your-yard/