Re-grassing holes 5,6

The following is a reprint of my April newsletter and following that I will be posting pictures of the regrassing of holes 5 and 6.

Notes from the Fairways

Well spring has sprung.  In this newsletter I am going to explain what is going on holes 5 and 6. 

Our greens are made up of a mixture of creeping bentgrass and Poa annua.  It is estimated that 65% of the golf greens in the United States are a mixture of bent/poa.  So you may ask why is it so bad? Poa’s survival mechanism is reproduction so it dumps all of its energy into making seeds.  Poa is a very weak plant and is susceptible to heat stress, cold stress and many diseases.    Poa is a very aggressive weed.  One plant can produce 360 seeds in a growing season, and can go from germination to seeding in 45 days.  With this said, in the past we would never have tried to produce a pure bentgrass stand of grass, but in the last 5 years some very aggressive new cultivars of bentgrass have come on the market along with many new chemicals aimed at controlling Poa.  Our plan of attack is to strip all the sod off including the collar and approach.  (The reason for removing collar and approach is to keep poa as far away from our new greens as possible). Next we will fumigate the soil to kill off some of the seeds in the seedbank.  The sod grower will come and lay large rolls of pure bentgrass on the green surface and Bluegrass for the approach and collars.  After about 5 days we will get a one ton roller and roll the greens and then probably mow the next day.  With decent weather we will be on the greens in 4 weeks.  Now it will take some time to get them up to our normal speeds as we have to slowly lower the Height of cut as to not shock them or scalp them.  For up to date information and pictures of this project checkout my blog at avondalegolfcourse@blogspot.com

See you on the course.

Picture of 6 green showing the survival of the overseeded bent grasss compared to the sodded  Poa from 2012. The Poa is the very dead looking grass on the left.

Preparing to cut out the old sod.  We went as deep at the sod cutter would go to remove as much organic material as possible

The next step was to cut it into pieces and lift it out and haul it off.  The pieces were very heavy since we had cut them so thick.  We did very well and in 1 1/2 days we had removed all the greens sod.

Next we triple rototilled  the greens surface to blend in any leftover organic material

Wheel packing the surface before smoothing and floating it out.

removing the approach sod, the reason we are doing this is because the same mower that mows the approach mows the collar and we want to keep the Poa as far away from are new bent as possible.  Note the wet spot an the left next to the grass, that is a natural spring.

The above 2 pictures shows us digging to install drainage to firm up 6 approach.  This natural spring filled up the ditch we dug by the next morning.  We installed drain tile and pea to capture this spring which should help firm up this approach.

We used the approach sod to build a new blue tee on hole 9.

Final  grading 

Ready for sod

On April 7th at about 10:30 am we will start laying the sod and will be completed Tuesday the 8th.  With decent weather we should be able to start playing on them around May 15th.  If interested the USGA published an article talking about the trend of re-grassing with pure bent, here is the link: http://gsr.lib.msu.edu/article/skorulski-cool-11-16-12.pdf