Artificial Grass Putting Green Design

[Douglas Kelley]

We finally capitulated to the shade, wear and tear from a large dog and rambunctious four year old, and poor maintenance, and have decided to install artificial grass in our tiny backyard.  I have torn off a 25 ft by 7 ft strip on the side to use as a practice putting green.  I'm going through the design with our installer now, and I thought to tap into the GCA expertise for any suggestions that you may have.   Ideally, I'd like to be able to practice the various combinations of uphill, downhill, left-to-right, and right-to-left putts, but I recognize that our space limitations are going to force us to make some tradeoffs.

See below the proposed diagram that our installer sent.  Please weigh in!  The one piece of relevant information that doesn't show up below is that there is a 1-2% slope running away from the house toward the alley.  Thanks!

[Wayne_Kozun]

I am on my second artificial green.  In both instances the green has/had more slope than what I would like.  I find that I use the green more for chipping from the artificial fringe than I do for putting as the putting still doesn't feel right to me.  In my experince you often get heaving of the green over the winter and after the first season you get some "microbreaks" in the green that can be kind of annoying (I live in Toronto and we obviously get frost in the ground over the winter especially last winter).  In a real green these could be solved by rolling but I don't know that you can really do that with an artificial green unless you remove the turf and move around some of the limestone screenings.

[Phil Lipper]

I'm actually going thru this process right now also.  The people I'm talking to are telling me that the best synthetic grass for putting doesnt hold anything more than short chips. I think part of the problem you run into is  deciding how much you want a putting green vs a practice area. We are looking at more of a practice area since I think just a puting are  will get boring and unused. All the people I have talked to also tell me there are huge differences in how the different products play, we are looking at Synlawn which I have heard good things about, but I'm not sure until its in how sure you can be.

[Michael Blake]

Hopefully Nuzzo will chime in with his insight.

[Douglas Kelley]

Phil -- We are also using Synlawn.  I don't really have the room to install a green large enough to accept chips or pitches, so I'm going with their highest-end putting surface.  I'll have a mat to hit chips to the green, but I don't think that will be the default use for the space.

[Douglas Kelley]

The finished product.  It turned out well.  Not perfect, but the are a lot of options of various putts to hit around the green.  I'm psyched on how it turned out despite the limited space.