MESSAGE FROM GROUNDS | Jon Urbanski
At the time of this update, we are experiencing dismal conditions of overcast skies and intermittent showers. The light amount of precipitation was just enough to wet the surfaces of the golf courses with no restrictions due to the lack of rain over the last 30 days. The daily conditions for the last week of the month were also enough to make the outdoor clay courts unplayable. The first few days of this month will be a repeat of these overcast days with sun giving way for the first weekend of the new month. The lack of rain throughout the last half of August, and continuing for the most of September, was evident in our storage pond on 13 and 18 North, as well as the lower reservoir to the left of 12 North. In fact, we curtailed the use of transferring water from the lower pond to the main pond in early September, along with condensing our automated irrigation programs to areas to maintain plant health. We have and will continue to pump from our alternate storage location known as Adams Dam. This waterway is at the intersection of routes 92 and 100, near the Brandywine Creek State Park. The very high evapotranspiration rates during the 30 day period mentioned in the first paragraph required a tremendous amount of water to sustain all of our surfaces and plant material. We expect to make up the level of the main pond throughout the month of October, and then begin to flow water to the lower reservoir for the majority of the winter. We have begun to receive reporting from various meteorological sources that this winter will be mild and a lack of snow cover, which will allow us to continue to flow water from Adams Dam for the majority of the winter season. This year’s fireworks display was held on a beautiful evening. You may recall on this same night, there was an incredible amount of flying beetles in the air. Usually, Japanese beetles are the most prevalent species during the summer months. However, this particular evening and for several weeks afterwards, masked chafers were the dominant scarab beetle species. These beetles are highly attracted to lights, and you may have observed the adults around windows or porch lights. It is during this time when masked chafer beetles mate, deposit eggs in the top 2 inches of soil, often in small clusters or areas. Egg hatch occurs, and what we have observed, the grubs are in the second or third instar of their life cycle. As colder temperatures begin to dominate, the grubs move deeper in the soil to overwinter. As soil temperatures increase each spring, the grubs return to the root zone, pupate, and emerge as adults to begin a new cycle. Even though we made pre-emergent applications for the larval stages in May and June for the entire family of scarab beetles, we are unfortunately seeing breakthrough in areas within and outside of our application coverage areas. The visible damage is turf turned over from scavenging animals such as skunks and foxes foraging for a meal. The breakthrough in areas that we did apply the pre-emergent can be attributed to a few factors: (1) as the damage is in areas of deeper maintained roughs, excessive thatch will not allow the material to reach the soil with either irrigation or natural precipitation, and (2) a majority of the areas experiencing damage are outside of our irrigation coverage by the automated system and we are reliant on rainfall to wash-in the material before it becomes ineffective to due degradation from sunlight. The populations of masked chafer this year resemble a periodic brood similar to the 17-year cicada.
Jon Urbanski Director of Golf Courses & Grounds
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