Spraying Fairways

One thing that is new in our agronomic plan this year is to spray fairways with liquid fertilizers and other products, compared to granular applications in the past.

It is amazing how things have evolved and moved forward toward premiere conditioning over the years.  Many years ago all areas of the golf course we treated with granular products, then we started spraying greens and leaving granulars on tees, approaches, fairways, and rough.  Then the liquid products moved to tees and approaches, and now many golf course are spraying their fairways also.

We use to be in the same boat in the past, liquid on greens, tees, and approaches, and granular on fairways and rough. The advantage of liquid products is the amount of different products and types that can be applied.  Granular products are limited to just fertilizer and a little new technology where they may coat the particle with another material like micronutrients, but still very limited.  

By spraying fairways we have 1000's of products that all do different things, the usual liquid fertilizer, but also micronutirent packages of the small elements the plant needs, wetting agents to make water more available to the turf, and growth regulators that help control how fast the plant grow.  The other advantage to this is that with our sprayers and mixing equipment these days, we can buy the raw material and mix exactly what we want to put into the tank.  When you purchase a pre-made product it is set with the amount of each nutrient, but with raw materials we can use soil tests to determine exactly how much of each nutrient we want to apply and give the soil and plant exactly what it needs. Purchasing these raw materials and mixing our own is really a financially feasible way of doing things.

This change to our agronomic plan will yield quit a difference to the fairways this year.  You will not see as many dry areas, the turf will be denser and tighter, and we will not have a surge of growth or a roller coaster in the color.  In the past when we would apply a granular we tried to feed the the plant only a small amount on a frequent basis, but you would still have surges in your growth where the plant grew a lot and had a dark green color and then it would lean out and grow very little with an off color of green.  By spraying fairways on a regular basis we can give the plant just the amount it needs for that period of time and then go out and re-apply.  This will decrease the roller coaster effect and keep a more even surface and appearance.

We saw the effects of these applications the last couple seasons, as we would always spray out the last few remaining gallons in our spray tank from our greens applications on the same portion of a fairway.  This portion of the fairway showed far superior turf qualities and conditioning when compared to the remaining fairway.