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Matt Schoolfield

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I'm bringing this up from a place of real ignorance. I've been thinking a bit about the poa issues at Bandon, and I've got a question for the course designers here. Forgetting what clients want, can you design for different styles of grass that would eventually consume a site anyway? There is always talk about regrassing Riv, but that seems like a fools errand to me because I assume the kikuyu would reassert itself within a decade.

Is it possible to build contours to better suit the dominate grasses, or is it actually ever practical to just entirely regrass a site? Steeper runouts for sticky grasses like kikuyu, slower greens with longer poa to smooth out the bumps or even match play courses on poa sites to reduce the need to putt out short putts. I've heard a bit about buffalograss for dry areas, but have no idea how it plays.

Do course builders have a real idea of which types of grasses will eventually overtake a site, or is it just chance? Are there any technology enhancements happening now to make this concern moot, because I presume someone like Toro will soon add machine learning lasers in their mowers to kill weeds as they mow.

I guess what I'm asking is whether it's prudent to embrace the terroir on a site, even if that means less-in-demand turf, or if that isn't as much of a concern.
« Last Edit: July 25, 2024, 07:10:12 PM by Matt Schoolfield »
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Wayne_Kozun

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Wouldn't one of the issues be that weather conditions can cause a change in the dominant species?  If you are in an area where you get ice cover that can kill off the poa so your greens go back to being primarily bent, at least for a while, assuming that you seed them with bent after the poa is killed off.

Matt Schoolfield

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Wouldn't one of the issues be that weather conditions can cause a change in the dominant species?  If you are in an area where you get ice cover that can kill off the poa so your greens go back to being primarily bent, at least for a while, assuming that you seed them with bent after the poa is killed off.
Yea, I'm in CA, so I'm mainly talking about areas with dominant grasses very often inundate others. E.g.: kikuyu/poa taking over areas of bent/fescue. I'm really not sure how this applies to other regions. I grew up in the Texas, and I know that bermuda is pretty dominant, but not sure whether it takes over in the same way. I also know that zoysia strains are becoming quite popular there.

I'm really just curious in general. I live walking distance to Golden Gate Park GC renovation, and they planted fescue, which is great, but I'm concerned about how long it will last. Dry summers are meant to let the fescues thrive, but I see what appears to be other grasses establishing themselves in areas. I'm definitely not a monostand advocate, but I think that's what my question is about. Whether and how grass dominance effects design, and whether it should.
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Wayne_Kozun

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Cabot Links is primarily fescue but in some low-lying fairways that tend to be wetter the fescue is being out-competed by other types of grass, presumably poa but maybe some bent as well.

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