Collar Problems

One of the hardest areas on the course to keep in good shape are the collars around the greens.  Unfortunately, most of the problem is self induced.  Every piece of equipment that we use on the greens, whether it be a mower, sprayer, roller, topdresser, etc creates some sort of traffic, wear, and compaction that is always concentrated just outside of the edge of the green.  Because of all that extra abuse, the collars generally get beat to hell, and we try to make an extra effort to go easy on them.

For whatever reason, the collars on our course consist of almost a 100% stand of Poa Annua in some places.  While the greens themselves actually mostly contain no more than 20% to 40% Poa, the collars are ripe with this annual grass variety.  My best guess is that years of improper maintenance has beat them up to the point where the bentgrass thinned out, at which point the Poa started to take over.  Also, I have a sneaky suspicion that years of mowing off Poa seedheads before chemical seedhead suppression was used tended to disperse more Poa seedheads just off the edge of the green as the mower heads picked up and turned, dropping them out of the bucket or off the rollers.

Whatever the reason, we are seeing some serious collar problems this year from our brutal winter.  The ice that formed back in January from the rainstorm seems to have been the thickest and most solid in the fronts of the greens where all the water ran to.  While whatever bentgrass was in the collar is fine, the Poa Annua is toast.

We have been aggressively slit seeding some of the new Alpha Bentgrass into these areas and topdressing them trying to get them to heal, but it has been a slow process.  It is a very difficult area to get seed to establish due to the abuse from all of our equipment on the perimeter of the greens.  Any seed that does germinate there tends to get beat up before it can really take.  For that reason, we have been very careful with how we have been mowing the collars this spring, have been mowing them less frequently, and have tried our best to completely keep the greens mowers and the roller off of the thin areas all together.

The collar on 17 was the worst as that was the only green that we
didn't remove the snow and ice from.  The one sod patch of bentgrass
from last summer tells a pretty obvious story though.

A perfect ring of death around 5 green.  It is hard for me to look at this
picture without getting steaming mad at Poa.

We are finally starting to see some of the bentgrass germinate with all the
wet weather we have had recently.  We will be treating these areas extremely
tenderly in the coming weeks to try and get the seed to establish.

Not to sounds like a broken record, but the real solution is to simply get rid of the Poa Annua, which is not a cheap or easy endeavor.  The quickest and most effective solution would simply be to cut out and re-sod the collars.  Believe it not there are tons of other golf courses in the midwest with the exact same Poa problem, and have dramatically reduced their winter kill issues by resodding the 5' around every green.  Look again at the first picture, with the 2' by 2' square of perfectly green grass surrounded by death.  Imagine if all our collars looked as good as that patch of sod as soon as the snow melted, instead of trying to regrow seed every spring to fill in dead spots.

The sod on our bentgrass nursery up behind 13 tee will be ready to harvest here in the next week or two, so we will be using that to finish the new ladies tees on 1 and 10 and taking whatever is left to re sod some of our worst collars.  After we have used it all, I plan on hauling in a truckload or two of sand in order to enlarge our nursery.  My hope is to get the nursery reseeded with a new plot of Alpha Bentgrass by the beginning of July, get it entirely grown in by this fall, and have it ready for harvest immediately next spring in order to avoid this mess in coming years.