Off to a quick start

For faster grow-in, fresh water is used to establish seashore paspalum on a golf course in the Caribbean

With a full season of golf traffic almost under its belt, the new island course at Royal St. Kitts Golf Club in the West Indies, which was designed by architect Tom McBroom and built by the Frontier Construction Co., has passed from a seashore paspalum test case to a working model – with some important lessons learned.

Because it remains a relatively untried turfgrass, every new paspalum course provides real-world information to superintendents and contractors. Royal St. Kitts Golf Club – the centerpiece of the St. Kitts Marriott Resort & The Royal Beach Casino – is no exception. Prospective paspalum users should be advised of the turf’s distinct needs when it comes to establishment (fresh water is preferred) and continued maintenance (be careful to save fresh water for other plantings), according to Nick Scigliano, president of Jones Mills, Pa.-based Frontier Construction and grow-in superintendent Greg Jackson.

“Paspalum is salt-water friendly, but people need to understand the fresh-water requirements to get the paspalum established,” Scigliano says. “This was our first paspalum job. The agronomic program presented to us dictated the use of fresh water to get it established. Once it was established, we introduced the salt water.”

With a project like St. Kitts, in which the decision to use paspalum (Sea Isle I on the fairways and Sea Isle 2000 on the greens) was dictated by the paucity of available fresh water, Scigliano points out the significant silver lining: “This stuff is really aggressive and grows fast,” he says. “Compared with Bermudagrass, I’d say it establishes 25 percent faster.”

That quick establishment is the reason why fresh water is recommended during grow-in, according to John Holmes, global sales manager for Georgia-based Phillip Jennings Turf Farms, a supplier of paspalum.

“Fresh water during grow-in isn’t mandatory, but when you use salt water to grow the golf course in, it takes longer,” Holmes says. “We recommend you find the freshest source of water possible. Otherwise, you have to rely on rain water to flush the soil of those salts. We recommend switching over from fresh water to salt water about 90 days after planting.”

Jackson – who is now in Fiji growing in another Marriott Golf-developed course using another paspalum strain, Sea Isle Supreme – followed these recommendations as best he could. And where he deviated, the results were predictable.

“I grew-in the entire golf course with fresh water,” he says. “However, toward the end of the grow-in, I was forced to blend with brackish water because we planted so many holes so quickly, and the desalinated water was insufficient to keep up. We began blending on the last two holes planted and got less than desirable results. The total dissolved salts was high enough to desiccate the young sprigs, resulting in a resprig after sufficient fresh water became available. If you were so inclined to use water with a reasonable TDS, say 3,000 to 4,000 ppm, you may be able to pull it off, however, this would lengthen your grow-in time.”

Before his departure to Fiji (Peter Stormes took over as Royal St. Kitts superintendent in late March 2005), Jackson was working on a system to pipe in straight sea water (34,556 ppm) from the desalination plant to the irrigation pond, then mix it with large volume aerators. This system was designed to save fresh water costs, help the suppression/desiccation of weed growth and give the turf its required dosage of sodium.

“As a true halophyte, this turfgrass needs a certain percentage of salt in its diet to perform and function efficiently,” Jackson says. “The plan would be to use enough salinity to take care of the above-mentioned issues, but continue to flush with fresh water to keep the salts moving downward in the root zone.”

Stormes arrived at Royal St. Kitts from Jamaica, where he was an assistant superintendent on the White Witch course at the Ritz-Carlton Rose Hall. Tifdwarf Bermudagrass was the turf choice there. Stormes says the Sea Isle I fairways at St. Kitts require some verticutting to keep them where they should be, but the main benefit is water.

“I can’t believe how little it requires,” he says. “In Jamaica, the Tifdwarf needed something every night, and in some spots, we couldn’t keep up. Here, it’s every three nights.

“We’re probably putting on 3,000 to 4,000 parts per million of salt,” he adds. “We have a desalination deal here. We pump it into the irrigation lake, but the salt leeches up into the pond. But it’s not really that salty. From taking Dr. Duncan’s seminar, it can handle a lot higher than that.”

Ronnie Duncan, Ph.D. is the paspalum pioneer who worked at the University of Georgia.

The trouble is, other golf course plantings typically can’t handle that amount of salt. Scigliano warns that once the switch to brackish irrigation water has been made, the onus moves to the delicate balance between accommodating the paspalum, which thrives on the salt water, and the other plantings around the golf course that don’t.

“Great care needs to be taken in the design and installation of the irrigation system to control exactly where the salt water is put down, so only the salt-water-tolerant material receives it,” he says. “When you switch to salt water, you have to be very careful with all the plantings around the golf course. If you get too much overspray with the irrigation, the other plantings don’t care for it. In fact, you can kill this stuff deader than a door nail.”

Get it done
Before the course was grown-in with paspalum, development challenges had to be overcome. Even though Frontier Construction is an experienced tropical contractor – it recently completed three new courses in Puerto Rico and one in Costa Rica – it wasn’t the original builder at St. Kitts. Canadian contractor Evans Golf started the project, but Evans opted out in 2002 when the project was delayed because developers were completing construction of a desalination plant, according to McBroom. Frontier was retained at the end of 2003 to finish the job – the back nine, practice range and extensive finish work on the front side.

“When the opportunity arose to bring in another contractor to finish St. Kitts, Doug Show and Frontier were the first contractors I thought of,” Jackson says. “Doug’s workmanship is meticulous, their equipment is in great condition, and they’re always ready to work. The finish work was perfect. And if there were any concerns, they were always properly addressed.”

Show is Frontier’s construction project manager.

St. Kitts is a tough place to work for a contractor, according to McBroom.

“You have to import everything, which leaves you vulnerable on a lot of fronts,” he says. “We hadn’t worked with Frontier before, but we were very happy with the job they did. Together, we produced one hell of a product.”

Aside from working with paspalum, construction of the 6,900-yard, par-71 layout was straightforward.

“It was a typical Southern job where you have to excavate all interior waterways to get the course to an elevation where it can drain,” Scigliano says. “By excavating a system of lakes, we created these water-holding features and brought up all the surrounding golf holes. We got them up above flood elevation, which is a pretty standard practice. We just shaped it out, completed the irrigation system, performed all of the clean up and grassing work, and the remaining cart path work.

“The course features are all pretty subtle, but McBroom’s people did a great job of keeping everything very visible,” he adds. “You can see probably 75 percent of the sand in every bunker on the golf course.”

Scigliano says he hopes golfers appreciate the sand views because all the bunker sand was shipped in from the mainland at great expense. Jackson and Frontier were understandably determined to ensure the sand didn’t go anywhere, so all the bunkers were outfitted with synthetic liners similar to those lining a lake.

“That was tedious work, and Greg’s crew handled most of it in-house,” Scigliano says. “But they paid a lot of money for that sand, and they couldn’t afford to lose it.”

Unfamiliar territory
Looking back on the project, Jackson is appreciative of Marriott’s support on St. Kitts, regarding the sand and paspalum. The first nine at St. Kitts was a learning experience for Jackson because it was his first time working with that variety of turfgrass.

“Fortunately for me, the owners were very generous during the grow-in, which allowed me to experiment with various fertilizers until I was able to figure out what worked the best,” Jackson says. “But I can’t say enough good things about using seashore paspalum. The fill material, as well as the topsoil, was a calcareous sand that was extremely high in sodium and bicarbonates. Due to the salt load in this soil, I was forced to apply judicious amounts of gypsum and deep-tine aerate into the soil profile both before sprig planting and during and after establishment. Some golf holes required as much as five tons per acre of gypsum and heavy flushing of fresh water before turf began to respond to fertilizers and started growing normally.”

Jackson says he started out on a 90-day granular grow-in program, but kicked the turf over to 100-percent foliars around the 80-day mark because of the poor response to the granulars on many of the holes. He says the roots were tied up by the sodium.

“I was tank mixing everything but the kitchen sink to foliar feed the turf, but got my best responses with Pure Liquid Seaweed (cytokinen), wetting agents, micronutrients, manganese and a significant amount of Primo,” he says.“Because Primo had not been approved for use on paspalum and documented usage was almost nonexistent at that time, I had to be very cautious.

“But the turf really took off after the all the gypsum applications,” he adds. “And once I found a liquid fertilizer cocktail the turf responded to, everything sort of fell into place. By the time the last nine holes were built, I recognized the bad areas and addressed them accordingly, so grow-in of the last nine wasn’t nearly as mind boggling as the first.”

For all the work Jackson and Frontier did to perfect the grow-in process, McBroom can take credit for specifying the paspalum to begin with.

“We actually specified it three years ago when it was just coming onto the market,” McBroom says. “We weren’t especially happy with Bermudagrass, but the issue in St. Kitts is always the amount of fresh water we would have. And quite frankly, we liked the color and the density of the paspalum. It has required a higher level of maintenance than we anticipated, and you have to topdress the bejesus out of it to get it to fill out. But given all that, we’re all very happy with it. It’s a terrific grass.” GCN

Hal Phillips is president of Phillips Golf Media. He’s based in Gloucester, Maine, and can be reached at onintwo@maine.rr.com.