May 24, 2010

I thought I would share a few facts about mowing greens…

At Greate Bay we send out four persons every morning to mow the greens. For tournaments, special events, and shotguns, we sometimes send out six to eight persons.

With four persons mowing greens, each person walks on average 2 plus miles mowing their assigned greens.

We walk mow our greens to get a better cut and to reduce the compaction and wear stress that a “riding mower” would cause.

Each day we mow greens a different direction so that “grain” does not develop. For instance, if you would take a moment and picture a clock face, we mow our greens 12:00 to 6:00, 3:00 to 9:00, 2:00 to 8:00, 4:00 to 10:00, and so on.

We measure and set our greens mowing heights in thousandths with a specially made gauge. Choosing a cutting height depends on many factors that I must weigh out: health of the turf, the weather, the type of coming golfing events, disease pressure, anticipated greens speed, membership comments, etc.

We do not change height of cut on a daily basis as that would be too stressful on the turf. In other words, green height change is planned out so that the height is changed over a period of days, and sometimes weeks, depending on the difference of change.

The greens mowers are checked for mechanical problems each day. There is no tolerance for error, as an error on a green could cause loss of turf.

Our staff collectively spends approximately 12 -15 hours a day mowing greens and checking mowers. During special events, we spend considerably more time!