By Stacy A. Bonos and Eric MacPherson, Rutgers University
Over the past decade, winters have become more unpredictable, with large fluctuations in temperature. There are even some days during winter in the mid-Atlantic and the northeast United States when it is warm enough to play golf. However, creeping bentgrass, the grass of choice for putting greens and fairways in these regions, is typically dormant during the winter. It is unknown whether winter golf play is detrimental to creeping bentgrass and whether tolerance to this stress could be developed.
With that in mind, we set out to answer two questions:
- If a golf course were to open for play on dormant creeping bentgrass turf, can the turf stand handle wear caused by the golfer and if so, how much?
- Are there differences between cultivars and selections of creeping bentgrass in their response to wear stress during the winter months?
Our ultimate goal, if differences between creeping bentgrass selections are evident, is to improve the winter performance of creeping bentgrass under golfer stress and develop cultivars with winter wear tolerance.
During the winters of 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, wear was applied to putting green and fairway cultivar trials on days when the temperature was above 400F (Figure 1). Fifty-two passes with the Rutgers wear simulator were applied during December through March in 2023 and 26 passes were applied during January through March in 2024. Significant differences between cultivars and selections were evident (Figure 2). All cultivars did recover without significant long term damage; however, there were differences in how quickly the creeping bentgrass recovered.
In addition to applying wear across commercial cultivars and selections, we also applied wear on over 1000 progeny plots and over 7000 individual spaced plants (Figure 3). The next steps are to identify individual plants with improved wear tolerance and intercross those selected plants to concentrate genes associated with winter wear tolerance. Progeny from those crosses will be evaluated in the future to determine if improvements in winter wear tolerance were achieved.
