Rough Improvements

The top picture shows our typical rough grasses, ryegrass, bentgrass and poa .  We know, bentgrass and poa are mostly found in fairways, greens and tees and when mowed at 3" do not offer a consistent rough to play out of.  Often times, the balls nestle down into the grass creating a difficult shot.  Another problem we face with this type of grass mix, is that during hot weather, we need to spray the roughs to keep these grasses healthy and this is a costly undertaking.   While we do make several spray applications to our roughs per year, we would need several more to prevent turf loss from occurring.  The bottom photo shows our trial of converting our rough over to more heat and drought tolerant grasses (tall fescue and gray leaf spot resistant ryegrass).  In front of the 12th and 16th tees, we scalped the roughs down to 1", sprayed a growth regulator and over seeded with the better variety grasses.  This will take several weeks to start to fill in, but in the long run we will see a much improved rough.  Once we measure the success of this trial, we will hopefully address the rest of the golf course next year.