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If It's Winter, It Must Be Time to Put On a Coat (of Green Paint)
December 1, 2005 By: Steven H. Long, H. Liu, L. Bert McCarty, J.A. Thackston TurfGrass TrendsPainting of greens has recently become the No. 1 alternative to overseeding greens for winter color.
Bermudagrass (Cynodon dactylon) growth stops when nighttime temperatures begin to drop below 60 degrees Fahrenheit (F). This is accompanied by discoloration of the turf when temperatures drop below 50 degrees F (McCarty, 2005) and eventually to full dormancy when frost occurs or as temperatures become lower than freezing. Superintendents in the Southern United States, therefore, often overseed bermudagrass greens to meet golfers' desire to play on green grass during winter and increase profits for their golf courses.
The most common cool-season turfgrasses overseeded into dormant bermudagrass greens are rough bluegrass (Poa trivilias) and perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne). When an overseeding season starts, the bermudagrass is often not fully dormant yet and is still competing for water and nutrients.
Overseeding itself is disruptive for the existing bermudagrass turf as verticutting or other physical means of thinning the turf is performed to provide good seed-to-soil contact. Additionally, to provide a quality putting green, high overseeding rates are often used. These high seeding rates plus cooler spring temperatures often weaken the bermudagrass turf and potentially results in catastrophic problems during spring transition into summer.
In severe cases, a golf course will transition from overseeded cool-season turf to severely thinned or even dead bermudagrass turf.
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Other problems include increased susceptibility to various diseases and the inability to rid the overseeded grass, which then becomes a lingering noxious weed. In addition to these management problems, cost can become a problem for golf courses as well, which is between $500 and $2,000 per overseeded acre (McCarty, 2005).
Overseeding is viewed by many golf course managers as a necessary high-cost practice to attract and retain winter-play golfers. For all these reasons, turf professionals have sought alternatives to overseeding and discovered a potential one in the simplest of areas, painting.
The alternative
The practice of painting greens is gaining notoriety because of its inexpensiveness, attractiveness, bermudagrass health maintenance and playability.
Rodney Lingle at Memphis Country Club in Tennessee has been successfully painting Champion bermudagrass (C. dactylon (L.) Pers. X C. transvaalensis Burtt-Davy) putting greens for 15 years (Carson, 2004).
When compared to high costs of overseeding, painting of golf course greens could potentially save a course significant dollars each year to be applied in other areas of required maintenance. Costs of painting greens usually range from about $900 to $3,000 total per season for an 18-hole golf course, depending on number of applications and price of paints (Carson, 2004).
Considering that an average 18-hole course has about three acres of greens, overseeding costs could reach upwards of $6,000 per season, twice as much as painting.
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