Arizona isn’t the easiest place to grow turf. Between heat stress and reclaimed water with a pH of about 8, Bermudagrass shows off its strength at Arizona National in Tucson, says superintendent Rick Darby.
“Bermuda’s a very resilient plant. It’s the toughest weed out here,” he says.
But getting it to thrive in those conditions takes more than just maintenance practices. Up until a few years ago, Darby had relied on a synthetics program to keep the public course green, spending about $40,000 on fertilizer every year. But about five years ago, the budget started to fall apart.
“Over the last five years, this golf course has been struggling immensely financially,” says Darby. “It just started getting leaner and leaner every year. It was on an absolute as-needed basis. We actually had to request money from the ownership to even get fertility applications.”
Darby lost about 50-60 percent of his budget, which meant suddenly having to rework his entire fertilizer plan.
“It’s an 87-acre property and I was probably spending in the neighborhood of $15-20,000 in fertilizer, and when you’re running $9,000 a load that goes pretty quick,” he says. “It just felt like everything was at that 9-1-1 stage.”
He had to take a hard look at his program, which was mostly a synthetic mix supported by applications of ammonium sulfate, with a balanced fertilizer applied just before overseeding for the greens. Across the fairways, he’d use a starter fertilizer in the fall and use ammonium sulfate in January and June. With half the budget, he started just by cutting his inputs in half, he says.
With less fertilizer on the course, he had to get creative, and started mixing up the formulations a little bit here and there to see what he could do to keep the turf alive. He spot-fertilized where he could to help the Bermuda fill in the bare areas. He maintained the turf with less inputs, like reducing the amount of nitrogen in his applications.
He also started introducing microbes to his irrigation system to help the turf process what nutrients he could afford, keeping them available when they were needed. He says he trimmed his rates a little more with the additional activity in the soil.
Then a former assistant whom he trusted suggested he take a look at controlled-release fertilizers, and he started doing the math. Though the technology cost a little more per application, he could potentially save overall. But he still had to convince management to spend a little more on fertility.
“I basically put the pencil and paper to it and said, ‘I want to do this one application, but it’s going to last me for eight weeks,’” he says. “I don’t have to really water it in right away, it’s going to save me more days of labor from applying. I can do it one time and get the longevity.”
One of the first things he noticed using controlled-release fertilizer was a more steady growth through the season, without surges that took more time to control. That even stood up to summer storms, which normally can cause rapid jumps in growth.
“Everybody down in Tucson runs reclaimed water. So when we get these storms that will bring down anywhere between one and two inches of rain in a couple hours, you actually flush out a lot of the sodium that’s built up in the soil, and the plant goes, ‘Oh, now I can grab a bunch of this stuff in the soil,’” he says. “So you tend to get these big flushes of growth in July and the very beginning of August, and if you’ve been running something with no controlled release, it just starts going gangbusters and you have a really hard time controlling it.”
The jump in growth gets especially messy because after five inches of rain, mowing immediately after isn’t really an option. But the new program helped him keep things steady and cut back on the labor assigned there. Overall, because the grass wasn’t growing as fast, he could get the mowing done in the roughs a day earlier and focus the labor on doing more detail-oriented jobs or other projects. Then there was also the labor savings of skipping those extra applications throughout the season.
“It saves me mow time, so I might save two or three guys a full 6-8 hour day of mowing and blowing and vacuuming and all that kind of nonsense because the clippings dispersed pretty well, and I only have to mow over the areas once a week – rather than hurry up and get it done, then go out and do it again,” says Darby.
In the last year or so, Darby’s budget has eased up a little, thanks partially to a foreclosure and new ownership by a management company about a year ago.
“I have a reasonable budget now,” he says. “It’s much more doable.”
But the lean years actually helped Darby get a handle on what worked for the course in keeping the turf alive in tough conditions. Recently, he’s been working in more foliar applications to assist his standard program, and he’s much better prepared to really fine-tune his input choices now, he says.
“Previously in the last couple years, everything’s just been a raw product,” he says. “Now I know what the responses are going to be, and covering what period of time.
“I’ve been presented with more options now, so I get to do a little more research. I can kind of pick and choose more now for what I feel is best for my particular turf's soil type, water sources. I can kind of choose a little bit better than saying, ‘Hey, what’s the cheapest I can use?’”
