Residential Golf fairway turf design

Choosing the grass for a residential golf area is critical and you must choose a turf that is drought resistant, hardy, with a fine grain and fast divot recovery.

As we live in North Carolina, we chose the Tifton 419 Bermuda, the Cadillac of golf turf.

Also see my full notes on Residential golf green design

We ordered out Tifton 419 sprigs from South Carolina, at a cost of about $1,600 per acre, delivered.

Prior to planting you need to kill all vegetation with Round-up, till the spoil finely, and spray with RonStar.  (RonStar is a a preemergent herbicide that controls a variety of annual broadleaf and annual grass weeds.)

Upon delivery of the Bermuda sprigs, it's important to get them in the ground quickly and keep them moist for a full ten days, until the roots take hold.

When the springs are spread, they look dried out and dead, but they are quite alive so long as they are kept moist.  If the Bermuda sprigs die, they turn a purple gray color.

It's also important to remove all livestock from the sprigged area.

Keeping the Bermuda sprigs wet requires about 6,000 gallons of water a day, a formidable challenge.

I had to buy several 1,000 gallon water tanks and drain water from a nearly pond.

As the water arrives, we pour it into a well hole and then pump the water from the well onto the sprig area using irrigation pipes and sprinklers.  We used a 10 hp. electric pump to get the water pressure required to spray the entire area, which needed hourly soaking during daylight hours.

This took the full-time services of a three man crew for the full ten day period.