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Low Maintenance by Design

by Don Dale

Australian links-style course

Jeff Hicks says it is sometimes difficult for visiting superintendents to understand his golf course. It’s a little rough around the edges, the sand in the bunkers isn’t pure white, there are no hills or magnified undulations to play, and the grass isn’t the pure, lush green of your stereotypical course. In fact, he’s proud to show off the mottled fairways developing as a more efficient grass type is taking over from a less efficient type.

Golfers are swarming over his charge, Rustic Canyon Golf Course in Moorpark, Calif., and the course has won several awards from golfing magazines since its construction in 2001. As the years progress, the course is deliberately making choices that make it even less of a “normal” type of courses. Hicks explains that he even has to refresh his own workers’ vision of what the course should be, because they want to overwater it.

What is Rustic Canyon? Hicks explains that it is an Australian links-style course that is designed to be rough around the edges. It’s a bump-and-run course that is more about the ground game than it is about pitching lofty shots over water. There is no water on the course, in fact, and a ball won’t plug because the turfgrass is kept dry and the ground firm. Golfers either love it or hate it, because it is out of the norm.

“It’s a fun course,” Hicks says, and more important to him and to the golf course’s bottom line, it is designed to be low-input and low-maintenance. It is using less and less water every year, grass types are selected to be efficient rather than emerald green, and the place makes a profit. He calls it a “minimalist” course. It also fits into the important image of a course that the public wants to see: one that is actually “green.”

Architects Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner liked the site at Happy Camp Canyon because it basically allowed them to insert the course with hardly any earthmoving. Grass could be planted in the sandy alluvial soils with only a little grow-in fertilizer. There was no need to create hillocks or scoops, because that would only detract from the vision of a links course with the heart of Australia or Scotland in it. Highlands Golf developed the site and operates it on land leased from Ventura County.

Generous fairways at Rustic Canyon show the Aussie links look.

Hicks likes seeing these mottled fairways because they indicate that the bermudagrass is taking over. Photos by Don Dale.

Hicks, who studied turfgrass management at Ventura College and was working as an assistant at nearby Woodland Hills Country Club as the course was being planned, got his first big job here as the construction superintendent. Hanse and Wagner’s small construction crew joined Hicks’ grow-in crew to build the course, and everybody pitched in. There was no outside contractor, and the cost came in well below $10 million.

The gentle slope of the canyon and the dry, windy climate were perfect for this type of minimal-input course. The architects set up a maintenance scheme where little water and fertilizer would be needed. The roughs, for example, are a perennial rye and fine fescue mix that requires little maintenance. Much of it gets no irrigation at all, and irrigated areas get three irrigations per week at 50 percent of evapotranspiration rate.

Greens and approaches are bentgrass. The greens are USGA-spec and large; the largest is the ninth hole, at 9,500 square feet. Watering is kept to a minimum for conservation purposes and to keep them firm and fast. Hicks says he wants the bent to be healthy, but still low-maintenance. He never wants to get into a situation where he has to verticut and fertilize a lot, and then use growth regulators to slow the plants down. Mowing height is 1/8 inch on greens and 5/32 inch on approaches.

“We don’t do much maintenance on bunkers,” Hicks adds. The sand is a blend of native sand from the site and red trap sand. An Augusta white bunker would be completely out of place here. Bunkers are raked three times a week and weeded, but the native plants at the edges don’t need much care, and the grasses are cut back about once a year. The rough bunkers add to the wild Aussie look of the course.

The bunkers at Rustic Canyon have a wild look and don’t require much maintenance.

The fairways at Rustic Canyon have been an evolving project. Originally planted in rye because a fall grow-in was necessary, the fairways are being converted to bermudagrass. This is strictly a water conservation measure, and Hicks is handling it by gradually seeding in a three-way bermuda blend of Transcontinental, La Paloma and SR 9554 seed. He wouldn’t mind having a hybrid bermudagrass, but it would be more expensive to sod it and would necessitate shutting down the course.

For two years he has been seeding the fairways, and is excited to show off the mottled results. The bermudagrass is gradually taking over, and by the end of next summer, if it’s a hot summer, he should be mostly converted to the warm-season grass. Once he has about 80 percent bermudagrass he will use a postemergent herbicide to kill off the rest of the ryegrass. “We’re seeding after an aeration,” he says, and when divots are repaired, the divot sand is mixed with bermudagrass seed. He has never overseeded here, and won’t once the bermuda takes over. Golfers will just play on dormant bermudagrass in the winter.

“It’s fine to play off of. It’s just brown,” he says. Golfers are accepting the encroaching bermudagrass, and Hicks hopes they will see that the eventual brown winter fairways fit in with the style of the course. More importantly, he expects his current $450,000 annual water bill to drop off significantly once the bermuda takes over. Summer irrigations will be much less than with ryegrass, and in the winter he will water only rarely, apply no fertilizer and mow the fairways once every two weeks just to incorporate divots and aeration plugs.

This regimen meshes with the original philosophy of the designers. Grass that is too lush would not fit in with the bump-and-run style of play and would undercut the entire look and feel of the course. Hicks is taking it even further. With about 50 acres of generous fairways, he feels he is irrigating too much unused turf, so he has been shutting off sprinkler heads on irrigated rough on some holes and reducing turf. On the 10th hole, for example, he has eliminated 18,000 square feet of irrigated turfgrass, and in recent years, he has slowly taken out about 3 acres on the entire 18-hole, 6,988-yard course.

Bentgrass greens and surrounds are big and firm to accommodate the bump-and-run style of play. Gently sloped sandy soil allowed the golf course to be built with almost no earthmoving.

Last year the course hired irrigation consultant Larry Rodgers to come in to GPS map the entire course and look at irrigation conservation. The course has a Toro Site Pro controller, so the scheduling was already efficient, but Rodgers made some specific changes that cut water usage. For example, by removing some large-throw heads on certain greens and installing more accurate Hunter I-20 heads, Hicks was able to have more efficient greens irrigation and cut down on weed growth in native plant areas near those greens.

By having the golf course GPS mapped, he acquired a precise map of the course and its sprinkler heads, so he is able to better map out plans for turf reduction and demonstrate to the county exactly where it is occurring. That will be important in the future as governments attempt to cut down on water usage.

In many ways, the Rustic Canyon design and philosophy have positioned the golf course well for the future in a resource-scarce world. For example, this is also a course that doesn’t use a lot of chemicals. “We haven’t sprayed a fungicide or insecticide for probably five years,” Hicks says, because a course with healthy turfgrass in a dry, windy climate with good drainage and lots of sunlight will have few pest problems. In fact, to get a turfgrass disease he has to encourage it deliberately. One method that he uses to reduce Poa annua invasions on his greens is to topdress the sites with sand in the summer and drag them to encourage Poa diseases. He calls it part of his IPM program.

Even the landscaping at Rustic Canyon is designed to fit in with the sere philosophy. There were only a few oak and eucalyptus trees on the course when it was built, and those were left in place partly because they don’t need irrigation. After construction, only about 20 trees were planted on the entire course, and some of those were natives to go along with the xeriscaping around the clubhouse.

Another benefit of this stripped-down design is that Hicks is able to maintain the course with 10 field workers and a mechanic. He would like more, and he has trouble taking on large projects such as building a new tee box, but he has a good crew.

One of his main problems is reminding workers that this course isn’t supposed to look emerald green. He has posted photos of other links courses in the maintenance offices to remind them of the look, and a recent note on his irrigation computer said “Do I need to water?”

“It’s ultimately not about how it looks, but how it’s playing,” Hicks says of Rustic Canyon. The popularity with golfers and golf publications illustrates that people will buy into the rough-and-dry philosophy as long as they have a good golfing experience.

Don Dale is a freelance writer and a frequent contributor. He resides in Altadena, Calif.