Bermudagrass practice tees are increasing in popularity in the Northeast because bermudagrass can recover from divots quickly in the summer. This is a big help for courses with undersized cool-season practice tees that cannot handle the traffic they receive during the busy summer months. I’m happy to see more courses starting to use bermudagrass practice tees in the Northeast, but it does come with some risk of winter injury. In addition to selecting a cold-tolerant variety of bermudagrass, here are a few other ways to reduce the chance of winter injury and strategies to promote recovery if damage does occur.
A recommendation I would make to any facility thinking of converting all or part of their practice tee to bermudagrass is to plan on covering the tee before winter. Or, at a minimum, I sometimes advise courses to overseed with ryegrass in the fall and apply a heavy layer of sand for protection. I believe that the ryegrass adds to the insulation of the sand, and it definitely provides some green cover early in spring until the bermudagrass can start growing again. I saw an interesting example of how well covers work on a USGA Course Consulting Service visit in the New York metropolitan area recently. One section of the cover on a bermudagrass practice tee came loose and blew off, exposing the turf to prolonged subfreezing temperatures and wind. The difference between covered and uncovered grass was obvious (see the title image for this article).
So, what should you do if you have winter injury on a bermudagrass practice tee? Fortunately for the course I mentioned, the area of injury is small and concentrated on the far side of the tee where they don’t need to use it right away. In cases like this, I recommend core aerating the injured section, removing those plugs and leaving the holes open. Then, deeply verticut the healthy area adjacent to the injured area and blow those shoots into the weaker area. Make sure to verticut deeply enough to get viable stems, stolons and rhizomes to establish new turf. Cover the shoots with a layer of sand and start fertilizing and watering as you would in a grow-in situation. This practice essentially acts as sprigging the damaged area with healthy vegetative material. If you have a large area of injury or if it is in the middle of the tee, you might need to sod the damaged area with new bermudagrass. This option will immediately improve the tee’s appearance but it will require several weeks of good growing weather for the grass to establish before it is ready for use.
Recovering from winter injury on a bermudagrass practice tee in the Northeast starts with patience. Bermudagrass greens-up later than cool-season turf, and areas that look dead in early spring may still recover as soil temperatures rise. I have seen injury like this on bermudagrass before, and for courses that do not choose to resod but rather spoon feed fertilizer once per week, most of the grass will typically recover on its own by midsummer.
Northeast Region Agronomists:
Darin Bevard, senior director, Championship Agronomy – dbevard@usga.org
Elliott L. Dowling, regional director, East Region – edowling@usga.org
Brian Gietka, agronomist – bgietka@usga.org