Here you see our nursery green that was so valuable this spring. The first picture shows it as we were taking the last plugs out of it to repair our greens and the second is how it looks after we tilled, harrowed, seeded and cultipacked it. We need to get a good start on growing it back just in case we need it next year. I sure hope not!
We were lucky that the nursery didn't have much winterkill and we were able to use most of the sod we had on it. It usually winters well as it is protected down in a hollow east of the driving range. As you know we seeded greens a couple of times but we were glad to have sod available to fix up really damaged areas quickly and also to repair spots that didn't fare well with seedlings. As mentioned in the last post it takes a lot of careful work to lay sod into greens because there is little margin for error or the sod will be scalped or too low. Those patches take about three weeks to knit together so you can't see the seam lines. Many have been in the ground about a week and a half so while you see many of them right now, within a week or two they will meld nicely with the rest of the green.
You can a see a small area in the far right corner of the second picture that is tilled up. We are going to plant a couple new varieties of bentgrass there to see how they perform in our climate and management. There continues to be improvements in bentgrass (and all grasses for that matter) with selective breeding and we may at some point want to take advantage of those improvements. So as the summer goes on we will also interseed into the chipping green with a newer variety to see how it performs and if we can establish it through interseeding into our present greens. If our evaluation provides some good results we may start interseeding the rest of the greens in the future. But that would be down the road a couple of years. Years like this though make you consider all options to provide good putting greens and newer varieties may help do that in the future.
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