Course crews finding ways to keep fairways, greens in shape with less water

Next time you need an excuse to play golf, try this one on your spouse or boss: I can get some lawn-care tips from the ground maintenance crew.

In drought stricken Colorado, golf course superintendents probably can teach homeowners a thing or two about lawn care. These professionals are paid to keep their turf green in a cost-effective way, which means being creative with a scarce, expensive resource — water.

?We are trying to utilize our resources to the best of our abilities,? said Mike McLaren, superintendent of Boulder Country Club. ?It costs us money to pump the water and deliver the water. Even though we’re a private club, we’re running a business here.?

Boulder Country Club gets the bulk of its water from the North Boulder Farmers Ditch and also has shares in the Colorado Big Thompson Project, which pumps water over the Continental Divide from the Western Slope. The club has cut back 30 percent on water use in recent years, McLaren said.

This is done by keeping the rough long and using a computerized irrigation system that delivers water based on the club’s weather station. The club also does ?what homeowners don’t do,? McLaren said, including soil airification and adding amendments and wetting agents to the soil. Those treatments create a stronger grass plant with deeper roots, he added.

Lois Ebel has seen it all in her 40 years as owner of Haystack Mountain Golf Course. She irrigates her 9-hole Niwot course using Left Hand Ditch water. Last year the ditch only produced about 5 percent of normal, making it a very bad year, and Ebel doesn’t think this year will be much better. ?People have looked at this big (March) snowfall, and it was great. And we’re all extremely happy for it.? Ebel said. ?But on the other hand it depends on what reservoir you get your water from and how big they are and who they serve.?

Ebel managed last summer by not watering pieces of the course — first the roughs, then the fairways, then the tees and last the greens. She wound up losing four fairways.

Ebel said she will reseed the fairways one at a time as she sees how the spring rains do and how the ditch is flowing. ?We’ll be able to get that grass growing, and then we’ll see what happens,? she said. ?If we reseeded all the fairways that we lost, we could lose them again if we don’t get enough water.?

Ebel also has been updating Haystack’s sprinkler system from manual to automatic. ?We’re an old golf course, a family business, and don’t have the money that the municipals or country clubs get,? she said. ?We never were really able to switch our system over before.?

Despite water problems, Ebel said the course is very playable. ?Grass is very forgiving. We’re in excellent shape considering what we’ve had to go through.?

The nearly 30-year-old irrigation system on Broomfield’s Greenway Park Golf Course wasn’t put in for maximum conservation purposes, but Superintendent George Banderet is doing the best he can under the circumstances. He’s putting humates into the sandy soil in the greens to help it hold more water and looking at putting on some additives on the rest of the golf course ?to open hard clay type soil to breathe better and retain water better,? he said.

During last summer’s heat, Greenway lost a few fairways and lost some grass on the greens. Heavy play during the mild winter put some stress on the grass, but Banderet said the course is in pretty good shape.

Greenway has its own well that is uses to augment municipal water. But next year the course will be using reclaimed water, Banderet said.

The city and county of Broomfield’s water reuse project has been under construction since 1994 and should be ready next summer, said Deputy Director of Public Works Mike Bartleson. The system takes effluent from Broomfield’s wastewater plant, treats it, and pumps it to customers that include parks and golf courses. Excess water is stored in Great Western Reservoir.

The reuse project was initiated and initially paid for by Broomfield and Interlocken, Bartleson said.

The reused water has to meet state quality regulations so that while it’s not as safe as drinking water, it’s not as dangerous as lake water, Bartleson said.

When the project is completed, and the reservoir is full ?we would expect a firm yield of 300,100 acre feet per year,? Bartleson said. It’s a benefit to Broomfield because it won’t have to buy that water from the Colorado Big Thompson, and it will cost about half the rate of potable municipal water, he said.

As co-owner of 2-year-old Saddleback Golf Club in Firestone, Tom O’Malley said his course was built with water conservation in mind. Original property owner, farmer Vern Hamilton, had secured good water rights on Coal Ridge Ditch for the property, and guided the new owners on how to use them effectively, O’Malley said.

The course was designed with deep storage areas, O’Malley said. ?That way we’re not taking the farmers’ water when they need it,? he said. ?Typically everybody wants water at the same time. So, when the farmers need it we’re not a big drain on the system.?

Saddleback is using better agronomy practices to use less water, O’Malley said. It is raising the mowing height in the fairways and roughs. It also is knifing, or slitting, the fairways ? a practice that allows water to seep into the soil. The grounds’ 1,600 sprinkler heads allow O’Malley to control exactly what area gets water and which doesn’t.

Although the recent snowfall helped a lot, Dave Brown, superintendent of Flatirons Golf Course in Boulder, said, ?We will still be very stingy with our water. We certainly will have lower rates on our roughs and landscapes. Out-of-the-way areas we probably won’t irrigate at all.?

Flatirons relies on Howard Ditch. When snowpack is good the ditch runs well. The course also has a pumping pond that can accommodate about two weeks of storage, Brown said. The pond recently was dredged to get it back to its original one-acre size, but isn’t being used yet for storage, he said.

The course is watered depending on information from two weather stations that indicate ?demand evapotranspiration? — the amount of water a particular area needs depending on wind, solar radiation, relative humidity and temperature. Brown said he waters at 50 percent of demand. ?If the turf is calling for two-tenths of an inch, we would give it one-tenth,? he said.

?We’re going to be very prudent with our water,? he said. ?We’re going to use all of our cultural practices — wetting agents, soil samples — to have the healthiest turf possible and then go from there.?Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail csellis@bcbr.com

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