Guy Cipriano
Bermudagrass represents boldness at The Preserve Golf Club.
Back in summer 2016, the private club inside Santa Lucia Preserve, a secluded eco-focused community in golf-spoiled Monterey County, California, converted its fairways from Colonial bentgrass to Santa Ana Bermudagrass. The decision sparked curiosity among central and northern California turfgrass circles. The Preserve sits above the 36th parallel and at more than 2,000 feet elevation. None of the club’s local or regional golf neighbors were seriously pondering a conversion to warm-season fairways at the time.
“It was a large leap of faith to say that we were going to do it and that it was going to be playable and acceptable, … but people love it,” says Forrest Arthur, the COO of Santa Lucia Preserve and general manager of the Santa Lucia Community Services District.
Arthur has an extensive history with The Preserve, a Tom Fazio design unveiled in 2000. He was the original superintendent and has risen through the community’s leadership ranks. Overseeing water management throughout the 20,000-acre community occupies large chunks of his time.
As more residences are added — Santa Lucia Preserve is limited to 297 homesites and around 150 are currently developed — less water will be available to nourish The Preserve’s 68 acres of irrigated golf turf. Bermudagrass offered a water-saving solution to provide quality golf while a community that receives less than 30 inches of annual rainfall, most of it from October through April, adds residents. “I love the environmental and sustainability approach at the property,” Arthur says.
Santa Ana Bermudagrass is the only fairway turf variety that superintendent Kyle Butler has managed at The Preserve. Butler arrived as an assistant superintendent in 2016. When he was promoted to superintendent in 2017, he had a limited peer network familiar with maintaining Bermudagrass in a northern climate. Butler leaned heavily on knowledge obtained from Mark Mahady, a Carmel, California-based turf consultant. The Preserve is one of Mahady’s longtime clients.
“We were in some ways guinea pigs and figured it out through trial and error,” Butler says. “You have your base agronomic knowledge, people around you, what you learned in school and then kind of figure it out to your location.”
Here’s what Butler and his team have learned about managing Bermudagrass fairways:
“We’ll green up come April and by around April 15 we’re regularly mowing again, and then we’ll hold color through Thanksgiving and into December. We then get into what I call ‘California Dormant.’ We’ll get a cold snap and we’ll turn to a golden khaki color. You’re not going to see a lot of growth, but then we’ll get some chlorophyll production and green up. All of our cultural practices happen in the summer. That has been a change for the club. Your aerations, verticuts, that type of stuff, which you used to do in the spring and fall, well, with warm-season turf, that happens in the summer. We’re doing them in early August and late July. If I could rewind and go back, that would be something the membership would be well aware of.
“I get at least a couple of phone calls each month with some club, usually in California somewhere looking to go to 100 percent warm-season fairways. Questions I get: ‘What would we have done differently? What has been the success? What has been good? What has been bad?’ I always say, ‘Make sure your membership knows you’ll be fraze mowing or doing a very aggressive verticut right in the middle of your golf season.”
The conversion immediately achieved conservation goals, as irrigation demand dropped by 10 million gallons during The Preserve’s first full year with Bermudagrass fairways, according to Butler. The club has since resurfaced its five-acre practice range with Bermudagrass. Firmer, tighter lies and increased ball roll are playability advancements related to the conversion.
“Last year, I would have put our fairways up in the middle of the season against anybody’s,” Butler says. “The uniformity, the firmness, the consistency is phenomenal. It’s been really good.”
Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry’s editor-in-chief.
