Opening Day is here! Unfortunately the weather isn't cooperating with thunderstorms that started around 8:00AM. That said, we did get a start with inner-seeding the #1 fairway. In the coming week, we'll be inner-seeding about 500 lbs. of bentgrass seed into our fairways. The variety we are using is called Crystal Bluelinks, which has Penn State University origins. I mean, why would we waste our time with anything else? :) The last sentence was a joke if you didn't pick up on that. In all seriousness, this is one of the finest bentgrasses available right now. If you had the pleasure of playing High Hampton GC, this is the variety of bentgrass that my friend and Superintendent, Dave, used on his fairways. As most bentgrasses do, they come at a premium; about $16 per pound of seed. A 25 lb. bag costs about $400.
You can see by the photos that we put our new tractor and seeder to work. The fairways will be seeded two directions, at a rate of 1/2 lb of seed per 1,000ft2.
Since we are incorporating seed on several fairways, I am holding off on spring fertilization for 3 more weeks. The reason for that is our fertilizer contains a pre-emergent herbicide to prevent crabgrass seed from germinating. These pre-emergent products can't differentiate between seed and will prevent any and all seed from germinating. It wouldn't be smart to put that fertilizer down and then seed into it. Once we start seeing good germination, we will fertilize the golf course at that time; likely by May 1st.
The photograph below is not from Highlands CC. It is however, a photo of a golf course that employed the same program. This photo was taken a couple weeks post-seeding; you can see the new grass germinating in the slits created by the machine. You can also see this golf course did the seeding process two different directions, giving the checkerboard look. I am very optimistic that this will be a game-changer for our fairways at HCC! I'm looking forward to seeing the results on fairways and approaches over time.
