At Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, OH—a private 18-hole course designed by Jack Nicklaus and home to the Memorial Tournament, a PGA Tour event—course horticulturist Tim Hollowell focuses on improving soil quality for better greens and fairways.
In the past, Muirfield Village Golf Club used compost tea, yeast, and mycorrhizae, but recently found better results with Holganix, a liquid bionutritional product that nurtures soil and plants naturally.
Holganix features a plant-based compost tea extract, with added beneficial nutrients and organic matter like soil bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes. This combination of living biology can cultivate a robust and biologically diverse ecosystem in the soil.
“Holganix takes the soil food web and brings it all together, working as one unit,” said Hollowell. “This is great stuff; I wish I’d known about this stuff 30 years ago.”
Using Holganix for greenhouses
Being the horticulturist at Muirfield Village Golf Club is no picnic. During tournaments, Hollowell and up to eight other team members work up to 100 hours a week to get plants camera-ready for the Memorial Tournament. In spring, he has two months to get the plants in mid-season condition. Holganix has helped him and his team greatly.
It all started when the director of grounds operations gave Hollowell leftover Holganix product to utilize in his two, 3,000-square-foot greenhouses. The greenhouses contain some 2,200 hanging baskets and 9,000 plants.
“My first experience with Holganix was taking container stock shrubs and dipping the plants into a five-ounce solution of Holganix with three gallons of water, before planting them,” Hollowell said.
He then planted the shrubs, watered them in, and mulched. Two weeks later, without any additional water, “the plants didn’t skip a beat. I never saw signs of stress or wilting,” he said. This was especially important because the shrubs were planted in August before the Presidents Cup tournament.
In another instance, Hollowell treated annuals with Holganix. After 30 days, he removed the annuals from their pots and examined the roots. White, weblike mesh was growing around the roots.
“It was mycorrhizae,” Hollowell said. “I could see it with the naked eye. I knew that if I had good things going on down below the soil line, life was good.”
Reducing pest and stress issues
Because Holganix promotes optimal plant health, it has also helped Hollowell produce healthier and stronger plants that are less susceptible to pest and stress issues. This was the case for the country club’s 1,000 rhododendrons: each year, about 24 were lost due to phytophthora, a genus of plant-damaging water molds.
“Since using Holganix, I’ve seen huge reductions in the number of lost rhododendrons. They are much healthier,” he said.
He has also seen positive results with Impatiens walleriana. Several impatiens acted as a control while he treated another set with Holganix. The plants treated with Holganix Tree and Shrub never got hit with downy mildew.
Applying Holganix and nitrogen
After his initial experiences with Holganix, Hollowell started utilizing Holganix Tree and Shrub on his plants and annuals, and later incorporated Holganix Bloom on his flowering plants. At the start of the season, he used Holganix Tree and Shrub on and off as he continued to test.
Soon, he started applying it every month on all plant beds. So far, he’s applied Holganix to the beds each month, from mid-March to October 1.
“Along with Holganix, I’ve been applying 0.175 lbs per 1,000 square feet of nitrogen per monthly application,” he said.
“With Holganix, the nitrogen is going straight to either the plant or the microorganisms found in the soil. It’s great for the pocketbook, the plants, the soil, and for me,” Hollowell said.
To learn more about how you can take a proactive approach to nourishing soil and stimulating vigorous plant growth, visit your local Ewing store or visit the Holganix website.
Laura Ory
Find your nearest Ewing location at EwingIrrigation.com/locations.
Welcome back to Birch Hills
At Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, superintendent John Wagner completed a trial of Capillary Concrete on the west course, which was put to the test recently when eight inches of rain fell in eight days.
