Thanks everyone for the nice comments.
The course is, and will remain uncluttered. It feels very big when you’re out there and some of the vistas are great. I truly believe that we have delivered a world class golf course. It’s not for everyone as the greens are quirky and it’s not “all in front of you”, but I’m confident we’ve given the client what he asked for.
Tim,
The greens do have a lot of movement and although I don’t own a stimpmeter I’m going to guess that we’ll keep them around 9 – 9.5. Basically I’m going to keep ramping up the pace until my boss says, “that’ll do”. He’s close to saying that already and I’m not yet done dropping the mowers. We planted Emerald Bermuda on the greens, a dwarf plant, but not an ultradwarf. We selected it because it has performed well in our area and it is very deep rooted. On greens we planted last fall we now have roots 9 inches deep, which means we can go a long time between our heavy irrigation cycles. While the ultradwarfs can handle mowing heights below 1/10th of an inch, we’ll stay at .125 or 1/8th of an inch. We wanted smooth rolling quick greens, but more than that we wanted dry turf on and around the greens. The ultradwarfs just don’t put down roots and they require frequent irrigation. We didn’t want to double up the irrigation around the greens so we designed and built everything with turf types, soil, and playability in mind.
The beauty of this project for me has been the fact that I’ve been able to integrate my ideals of how the course should be maintained into Mike’s design from the very beginning. Irrigation design, materials selection, grass types, equipment, maintenance facility design…all the decisions made from an agronomic or functional standpoint were made to provide the playability to show off Mike’s design. We did it all, and so far we are very happy with the outcome.