Kings Creek Country Club: Reclaiming Putting Surfaces 12/1/2012

Reclaiming lost Putting Green Surfaces

A couple of our winter projects, reclaiming lost putting areas and relocating the forward tee on 2, were understandably a little slow to get started thanks to huricane Sandy and a nor’easter the following week. Fortunately the course fared very well. The storm took out several trees, but all of them were in out of the way areas and needed to come down anyway. There were small branches, leaves and debris everywhere. All things considered we got really lucky here.

We have reclaimed lost putting areas on the 8^th green with sod from old 9 green. Since old 9 green is one of the original greens, it’s rootzone sand material matches up to all our greens except for 11, witch was add in 2005 to make the driving range possible. Once the sod is rooted down it will need to be aerified, rolled and topdressed agressively with sand. Reclaiming these areas brings the bunkers back into play and creates many new hole locations. The increased hole locations along with the increased overall size of the green will spread out the traffic stress and should help improve the overall health of the putting green. Next we will reclaim areas on the back of 7 green and a small area on the right of 6. Next spring we will reseed old 9 green and then use it again next fall after the reverse the course tournament to reclaim more lost putting areas.

To find the original green we use soil probes to locate the edge of greens mix. The greens were originaly built with a 12 inch USGA spec sand followed by a geotech fabric and then a coarse gravel drainage field. The frabic keeps the finer sand from contaminating the coarse drainage stone. The use of fabric in our greens construction is unusual and not recomendend by the USGA. Typically a smaller gravel is used to avoid sand migration into the drainge stone.