My wife and I played Laurel and Cherry soon after it opened and what surprised us most was the incursions of weeds and common Bermuda grass into the fairways and rough and that is happening all over the villages. You surely would not expect that at Palmer and really none of the courses. Many of the green.s ...have crows feet weeds as well. In my opinion this is due to heavy over seeding of the greens and fairways and tees. At other premier courses like Ponte Vedra Country Club and Inn the greens are only lightly over seeded so the spring spurt growing in of the Bermuda is not so terribly impeded. This is also how you get weeds growing in especially the when using the cheapper variety of rye they use on executive courses. Same with the sand used when bunkers are rebuilt - it's never the better grade used originally that has a courser grain which is easier to play out of. It's a cheap sand variety that is usually just dumped in. That's not the way any of the championship bunkers were built originally and not how it's done by real course landscape companies that follow USGA standards - it's the way inexperienced landscapers do it - it should be laid in lifts and tamped in as they are filled and wet as they go. The bunkers that are "rebuilt" in the Villages are never put back to the same original standard using proper grain size sand - it's all about saving money and just having a "look". Proper bunkers are found at courses like Belleglade that haven't been rebuilt. The overseeding heavily is the biggest problem for our greens in the Villages. It's not about golf it's about selling real estate. It should be much lighter and then we, those of us that live here year round would have good Bermuda greens for most of the year instead of rye most of the year while the Bermuda struggles to grow in every year. In Atlanta all the public course went thru this until they finally stopped overseeding. They also changed all the grass over to champions Bermuda and they paint it 2 months out of the year and for 10 months they have perfect Bermuda greens that are very fast. Even Augusta National has changed from bent grass to Champions Bermuda. If they can do this at the public courses in Atlanta we surely could here. We deserve better here in the Villages!
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