skip to main content
  • Shoulder-season maintenance is difficult for golf courses that experience a seasonal reduction in staff size, often forcing some tasks to be delayed until the staff size increases again during the primary playing season.
  • Applying a nonselective herbicide is an effective way to slow the growth of warm-season grasses on bunker edges so that turf managers can focus resources elsewhere.
  • Use a backpack sprayer to apply a small band of product at the interface of sand and grass to eliminate the need to edge bunkers and remove grass runners from the sand faces during fall.

Golf course maintenance teams throughout the country are faced with shortages of labor and resources, which has a direct impact on maintenance scheduling and timing. Golf courses in the northern half of the country especially feel the pinch during the spring and fall when the weather is usually nice enough to play golf but the maintenance team is not fully staffed with seasonal personnel. Consequently, prioritizing maintenance is extremely important during the shoulder seasons to ensure maximum efficiency.

Courses with warm-season grasses on their bunker faces have a time-saving maintenance option that cool-season turf managers do not: using a nonselective herbicide to slow growth. For instance, Mike Salvio, superintendent at Ocean City Golf Club in Ocean City, Maryland, applies a nonselective herbicide to his zoysiagrass bunker edges at a rate that stops growth without killing the turf to reduce the time spent edging bunkers in the fall. This started after several years of reducing the maintenance staff from 17 people during peak season to seven people in the fall. During the peak season, the 109 bunkers are edged every seven to 10 days with four employees. The task takes a full day for each employee. Allocating that amount of staff time to bunker edging in the fall was very difficult. Applying a nonselective herbicide eliminated the need for bunker edging and removing runners from the sand, making all that staff time available for other tasks. The only grass around bunkers that now requires hand mowing in the fall is along the top of the bunkers, where the rough mower cannot reach.

Salvio has found that using a nonselective herbicide to eliminate the need for regular bunker edging when he has a smaller staff allows him to focus more resources on preparing the primary playing surfaces for daily play, or to complete in-house improvements like drainage projects or tree removal. Golfers have yet to voice concern over the appearance of the off-color strip around the bunkers, especially considering that all the grass recovers normally the following spring. However, golfers do notice and enjoy the many course improvements that take place each offseason with in-house labor that greatly reduces the overall project costs.