While there is a lot of work that needs to be done to the driving range, the focus of this blog post is the turfgrass coverage on the tees. Here are some photos of the tee conditions as of last week.
The current grass species is perennial ryegrass. Ryegrass isn't a terrible grass to have on a driving range where you have plenty of usable locations. We do not have many different teeing locations due to the fact that the back side of the range needs to be lengthened to prevent balls from being lost into the woods. This situation is one that we hope to someday rectify but until then we are forced to get as much use out of the back two range tees as possible. This means that those two range tees get a lot of use and being that ryegrass isn't a spreading turfgrass, recuperation can be a slow process. Our long term goals for the driving range tees are to convert them to bermuda grass. Bermuda grass is a warm season grass that will go dormant in the winter. However, during the golf season the range tees will be covered with a resilient and durable turfgrass. The only disadvantage to bermuda is brown turf for about 5-6 months when it is cool. That being said, we feel that it will be a long term solution to a problem area. We will achieve bermuda coverage over time. This will be done by overseeding all of the range tees every year during the months of May, June and July until a desired coverage is achieved. We may even seed them several times during those months. In the mean time we have decided to move forward with trying to improve the range tee by seeding it with ryegrass. Seeding and fertilization will hopefully improve our range tees enough to buy us a couple months of playability until the upcoming bermuda seeding. Here are photos of that process.
Step 1: Aerate several times
Step 2: Drag the area to break up and smooth aeration cores
Step 3: Blow off any leaves or leftover grassy material
Step 4: Seed
The only other thing we will continue to do is keep our fertilization levels high. The rest is going to depend on some good weather to moisten the seed and get it growing.
While we are on the topic of seeding I would like to mention that while I understand that there are a lot of areas especially in rough that everyone would like to see seeded this spring, it simply isn't the time to do so. The most important thing that we can do to improve our rough areas this spring/summer is to prevent weeds through pre-emergent and post emergent chemical applications and fertilization which results in the promotion of existing plants. The driving range tee was the exception because we are on a shorter timeline on these highly used tees. The seed we are applying to these tees prevents us from applying pre-emergent. Even in a small area like the range tees, weeds will be a concern and could be a costly problem. This is the only area where taking this risk is acceptable. In all the other rough areas we have chosen to delay any seeding until fall. If anyone would like a further explanation of this, I would be happy to do so.
Klint Ladd
Golf Course Superintendent
