Green Greens

Northland golf course goes organic

Robert Lillegard

In the summer of 2007, golf courses were lush and green everywhere—except the Northland Country Club. The grass, once thick and rich, turned dry and thin. A dark green gave way to pale shades of yellow. Dry, brown patches spread over the course.

And Course Superintendent Chris Tritabaugh planned it that way. A drier, more natural-looking course was the goal of a new approach. By applying holistic, natural remedies to turf problems, Tritabaugh hopes to make the course cheaper to maintain, gentler on the environment, and closer to the original design.

“It's really easy to make a course look green,” Tritabaugh said. “It's not quite as easy to make a good playing surface.”

When legendary golf course designer Donald Ross planned Northland, he didn't include an irrigation system. A drier course changes game strategy by letting a played ball roll further. In a speech given at the Northland Country Club, golf historian Bradley Klein encouraged the members to preserve the course as it was designed.

“It's important to step back and view it with a certain humility,” Klein said. “The game has changed a lot, but Ross's courses have held up over the years.”

It's the job of a course superintendant to make sure they keep holding up. With his new methods, Tritabaugh is holding up the environment as well. The trick is to think broadly and view the ecosystem as a whole.

Those dry spots are a good example. Previously, Tritabaugh said, grass had grown so thick that it blocked water. This “thatch” smothered soil microbes and encouraged plant diseases. The solution was to let the area dry out. The dying plants turned into nutrient-rich humus, which fed the soil instead of starving it.

Tritabaugh's storehouse is part farm, part apothecary. Large drums of hydrolized fish stand next to seaweed extract, yucca extract, and old-fashioned molasses. A barrel of worm casings is mixed with compost, then steeped in water to form a compost tea.

By spraying these products, Tritabaugh feeds soil microbes. As these microbes multiply, they protect against disease, aerate the soil, and encourage earthworms to reproduce. The earthworms further aerate and enrich the soil. The end result? Healthy grass, for one eighth of the fertilizer.

“It's worked wonderfully,” Tritabaugh said. “We've reduced our chemicals, we've reduced our fertilizer costs.”

Furthermore, they've brought back some of the original Ross feeling to the course. By not making major changes over the years, Klein said, Northland has put themselves in a better position than other clubs.

“You see these places that are hard-edged and aggressive,” Klein said. “Then you walk into a place like this; it's low-key, it's simple.”

With his “organic approach”, Tritabaugh intends to keep it that way. He's looking at ways to partner with WLSSD and use more compost—the one resource, he says, we'll never run out of. He's also applying essential oils to treat “dollar spot,” a fungus that damages particularly wet areas of the course. With his mix of strategic watering, natural supplements, and sporadic chemical blitzes, he'll protect the course's character as well as the turf.

“This approach really fits well with where we are,” Tritabaugh said. “I feel better when I go home at night knowing that we do things like this.”

Even with the occasional brown spot.