Snow Melting Experiment

A bunch of different things have happened over time to make me want to rid the golf course of snow quicker than usual. 1) I received a broucher in the mail a while back promoting the idea of using black sand to speed the melting of snow (assuming it is always sunny!). 2.) The possible threat of not re-registering a product we depend on for snow mold control. 3.) The development of a "biological" snow mold control. 4.) The increasing costs of fungicides. 5.) The push to be more "environmental"

First a little primer on snow mold: I'll generalize a bit but most of the winter disease on KGC is either gray or pink snow mold. Both diseases survive the summer as a spore within the thatch layer. The spores germinate in the fall and grow under snow cover (especially when there is plenty of snow over unfrozen, wet ground). A level of control is achieved by applying fungicides in the fall that limit growth of the germinating spores. Some fungicide efficacy is lost over the winter allowing for the development snow mold in the early spring. The decreasing control is one of the reasons why we blow snow off the greens if we think the disease pressure is high.

Greens will never be able to overwinter without some form of chemical disease control. However, with our fairways there is a greater "buffer" to handle some level of disease. The surface area is substantially larger (the fairway area on #16 alone is equal to the total area of the greens), some grass species (fescues and Kentucky blue grass) that exist on our fairways are somewhat resistant to snow molds as compared to the mostly Poa annua species on the greens which has no disease resistance, and the fairways can handle a little more abuse because they are maintained at a height of cut (3/4 " for fairways vs. 5/32" on greens) that allows them to recover quicker from winter damage.


If we can melt the snow and get the turf surface to dry quicker we will have less incidence of disease. The picture on the left shows about 7 to 8 inches of snow on the driving range. We ploughed a series of roads so we would be able to spread the sand on top of the snow.

The picture on the right shows how much snow melted after 7 days. Temperatures ranged from -10 at night to +9 during the day with mostly sunny conditions. If you double click on the pictures you get a better idea of how much melted in a short time. We will use this for melting the small amounts of snow left on our greens in the spring when we think it is appropriate.

We will see how quick the exposed areas on the range green up to the area we left the snow on. With a few other techniques (such as dethatching) we may be able to lessen the severity of winter disease damage on areas such as the fairways.