Painting the greens

Willie Hamby and Mitch Sivley recently finished painting the greens on the golf course.  It is fairly late in the year for us to do this project but we tried a different approach and product this year that simply didn't give us the same results that we are accustomed to with the paint so we went back to using the paint.

So why do we paint our greens compared to overseeding or leaving them "dormant brown"?

Well, applying a paint to the greens surface has many advantages both for the golfer and for the turfgrass plant.  For the golfer, the paint provides a more visually appealing area on the golf course and helps to identify the putting green area against all of the dormant winter turfgrass landscape.  The agronomic benefits include increased surface temperature resulting in reduced frost accumulation and earlier spring green up. Painting the greens also eliminates the issues involved with overseeding of the greens...the disruption to the green surface during seeding and establishment, the competition between the overseeded turfgrass and the desired putting surface and not to mention the cost of the seed, fungicides, fertilizer, and manpower needed to produce an acceptable winter putting surface.

#8 Green before painting

Willie Hamby painting the green.  There are many different ways to paint greens.  We use our 300 gallon fairway sprayer and spray the paint on by hand. I like this way because it gives us more control over the application and we can spray right up to the edge of the green without having to worry about overlaps or skips.  It took a total of 12 manhours for Willie to apply the paint to the greens using 50 gallons of Green Lawnger green paint and 12.5 gallons of AquaStripe Black paint.  We use the black paint to darken the paint to help it absorb and retain more heat than simply using the green plus the darker color looks better.

In order not to ruin our existing putting green cups with paint as the green is painted we place an old putting green cup into the top of the cup. 

Green after painting.  The entire green took 19 minutes to paint and the color will last until spring when the grass begins to grow and we start mowing the greens again.