Over the course of the year I have fielded a large volume of questions about the appearance and condition of our nurseries. While I certainly never would have guessed that the nursery of all things would be the source of so much conversation, I thought I would take a moment to address these questions and concerns by explaining exactly what the nursery is and how it is meant to be used.
The first and most straight forward of a nurserie's functions is to provide sod for repairs. By seeding and establishing separate stands of green, tee, and fairway turf we are able to affect minor and even some major repairs to damaged areas in house. Specialty sods like the fescue we used to repair south oriented bunker faces have to be ordered from area sod farms. However, the bentgrass sod on two fairway this morning was cut from the nursery not twenty minutes before it was laid. And because the nursery is maintained with all of the same practices as our course features, once installed it matches it's surroundings.
The nursery also serves as a sort of turf laboratory. Experimentation is in integral part of the scientific process and rather than experiment on the golf course, we perform them on the nursery. Want to test a new fungicide or fertilizer? We head to the nursery. Need to see exactly how a prospective piece of equipment operates? We take it to the nursery. Unsure about a new crewmen's machine operating skills? Nursery. And if the application rate is off, or the machine doesn't quite deliver as we expected, it's the nursery that suffers instead of your course. In some cases the turf will even die (the price of discovery) and if it does, we seed it and start over with the players none the wiser.
While it is important to maintain the nursery with the same practices as the course it is a separate entity. It is meant to serve function over form, with aesthetics being at the bottom of our list of concerns for it. As seasons come and go it will be burnt, killed, seeded, practiced upon and stripped bare in short order. And in all of these things it will be serving it's purpose.
See you on the course!
Elliott Dowling
