[OKC] From NY Times: Exclusive Golf Course Is Organic, So Weeds Get In

[Miles, Karen]

Exclusive Golf Course Is Organic, So Weeds Get In


By BILL PENNINGTON
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/bill_penni
ngton/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 

EDGARTOWN, Mass. - Standing alongside the 13th green at the Vineyard
Golf Club on Martha's Vineyard, Jeff Carlson spotted a small broadleaf
weed between his feet. As the superintendent charged with maintaining
the club grounds, he instinctively bent to pluck it, then stopped. 
"We have a weed here or there," he said unapologetically. 
It was the rarest acknowledgment in American golf course landscaping -
the Vineyard Golf Club <http://www.vineyardgolf.com/>  is not meant to
be as unnaturally perfect as many of the country's best-known courses. 
Opened eight years ago, the club is thought to be the only completely
organic golf course in the United States, its 18 holes groomed without
the use of a single synthetic pesticide, fertilizer, herbicide or other
artificial chemical treatment. 
"When we started here, some of my peers thought this golf course would
be a dust bowl," Carlson said, walking across a lush, smooth green
toward a rolling, verdant fairway. "I admit I wasn't so sure it could be
done myself. People said we were crazy." 
The club has a more prominent endorsement now. The nation's first
golfer, President Obama
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_oba
ma/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , is expected to play here while
vacationing this month, after playing the course twice last year. 
With golf courses increasingly being criticized for environmentally
unfriendly practices, the Vineyard Golf Club has become a petri dish for
alternative maintenance techniques. Carlson has learned to kill weeds
with boiling water and a natural foam cocktail and to remove moss with
kitchen dish detergent, and he has transported microscopic worms from
Iowa to attack turf-ruining grubs. He has disrupted the mating cycle of
damaging oriental beetles with a strategically placed scent and has
grown grass that he believes is more resistant to disease because it
developed without chemicals. 
The staff at the Vineyard Golf Club are now seen as environmental
pioneers, with many in the golf industry examining their methods. The
club's organic model could become the successful experiment that helps
push thousands of courses toward using fewer pesticides, less water and
more natural grass-growing procedures. 
"Everyone won't be able to go fully organic, but we're proving you can
severely cut back on synthetic chemicals," Carlson said. 
Article continues at: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/sports/golf/17vineyard.html?th=&emc=th
&pagewanted=print
 
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