Fairways and deep chills

Long before the first snowfall, Cory Janzen and his associate superintendent, Adam Kimber, prepare Westmount Golf & Country Club for its long winter’s nap.

“There are cultural practices we do every year heading into the winter to try to prevent ice damage,” Janzen says. “We want to make sure we have the healthiest turfgrass possible with some reserves of carbohydrate, so that if the grass needs to start growing early in the spring, it has the resources it needs.”

Westmount’s undulating bentgrass and Poa annua fairways are integral to the player’s experience — typical of Stanley Thompson-designed courses — and finding an even lie is as likely as finding a four-leaf clover.

Aftere earning a bachelor’s of science in agronomy from the University of Guelph in 1993, Janzen learned the profession from the mensch of Canadian greenkeeping, Gordon Witteveen, at The Board of Trade. He arrived at Westmount in October 2001 and immediately made changes to the club’s cultural practices, including collecting clippings, lowering the height of cut and mowing Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons, rather than in the afternoons.

Janzen also made sure there was a meeting of the minds among members. “I always tell members that from the May 24 long weekend until Canadian Thanksgiving, we do everything — or we try to do everything — that benefits the golfer as far as green speed and fairway conditions, but outside of those two dates, you have to let us have the keys and let us do what we need to do to prepare the course for winter,” Janzen says.

Despite always having worked at courses in turfgrass growing zones where Mother Nature blankets the ground with snow for at least four months annually, Janzen is fortunate that he has experienced very little ice damage in his 30-plus year career.

“You hear stories from other superintendents about situations where the snow all melts and things look like they might be OK, then all of a sudden a week or two later, they’re not,” he says. “It’s never that simple, but one of the ways to help prevent that from happening is having healthy grass going into the winter.”

Some other regular preventative cultural practices on Westmount’s fairways, where dollar spot and anthracnose are the biggest turf disease concerns, include:

• Raising the height of cut in the late fall to allow more photosynthesis to occur and store extra nutrients for the dormant months ahead.
• Topdressing and aerating fairways twice annually (spring and fall).
• Verticutting, also in spring and fall.
• Rolling, to remove dew on non-mowing days in the summer to help with disease suppression, particularly dollar spot.
• Spraying with a variety of fungicides and herbicides.

In his 35-year career, Janzen has witnessed the gradual year-by-year increase in members’ expectations.

“Fairways at private clubs have now become what greens once were in terms of height and expectations,” he says. “In some ways, we superintendents, are our own worst enemies because we all strive to be better and better, and as soon as you lower that height of cut, even slightly, you set a new bar. Sometimes, I wish I could go back to when I arrived at Westmount in 2001 to walk the course, just to see how different the height of cut was.

“It’s always a balancing act at a club like ours where we have some really good players and also some high-handicappers. When you cut the fairways too short, some members complain that they can’t hit a wood off it because the ball is not sitting up, but the good players love it. We’ve struck a pretty good balance with our height of cut now, which is .335 inches.”

— David McPherson