Putting Green Open

The Putting Green is now open for play. We recently aerated and topdressed it so it will be a little bumpy for a while. Unlike the third green, it will be open full time. This is because the putting green was sodded to 100% bentgrass. Bentgrass is much more resiliant than annual bluegrass. It is also more drought tolerant, survives the winter well and doesn't produce seedheads. (Speaking of seedheads, we certainly have a bumper crop of them this year! Putting will be slow and bumpy for another week or so.) The putting green also receives much more sunlight (especially morning sunlight which is very important) than #3. Why don't we have 100% bentgrass on all our greens? Great question. The two things that bentgrass requires are sunlight and well drained soil. If we were to resod all of our greens to bentgrass, they would decline and become infested with annual bluegrass very quickly. That's why we used aeration cores on our new third green. We could have sodded it to bent and played on it sooner however, for the next 5 or so years the green would have done poorly and slowly evolved into what we now have - a mix of poa and bent similar to the rest of our greens. The only way to have bentgrass on all of our greens would be to completely rebuild them and at the same time remove trees so they receive more sunlight. This has been done recently at Mississauga Golf & CC to rave reviews.