Collar Problems....Again

We seem to have a recurring theme with the Poa annua in our collars dying more winters than not.  For whatever reason, while our greens are in the ballpark of 60%-90% bentgrass, all of our collars are almost completely Poa.  The perfect line from bentgrass green to Poa collar is almost freakishly unnatural in some areas.

Regardless, we seem to struggle every year with losing a lot of turf in the collars during the winter.  This winter, with the long snow free periods in both the middle of December, and the middle of January, it is no surprise that most of the Poa checked out, as it has very poor cold tolerance compared to bentgrass or kentucky bluegrass.  The Poa simply froze to death without an insulating blanket of snow.

13 green is a perfect example of the transition from
bentgrass green, to Poa annua collar.

The collar on 17 is mostly dead, except for a few odd
patches of bentgrass sod from last summer.

A fair amount of the Poa annua will come back some on its own, but I am anticipating some larger areas that may have very spotty recovery, or may not recover at all.  In years past we have tried aggressively seeding bentgrass into these areas, but collars are a notoriously difficult area to get seedlings to survive and establish.  This is due to all the traffic and abuse the perimeter of the greens take from all of our equipment as we work on or around them.  This coming week we will likely start seeding into some areas that are showing mild recovery, but any area that looks completely dead we will save our seed and opt to just sod the area out here in another week or two.

We've kept our bentgrass nursery covered since the middle of March, and
the results have been amazing.  Our sodcutter will be getting a workout
here in the coming weeks.