Are you looking at a Greens mower or reel mower? There is a huge difference like $5000 to $15,000 difference.

...dont know if they will ever fill in.

Bwahahahahahaha! I know you really don't know the answer and I should not laugh, but bentgrass is an aggressive weed in many lawns. As you have already experienced, yours should fill in (again) nicely.

Woodycrest, a long time Gardenweb member who has been missed here for about a year, is an organic greens keeper in Canada. When he got this gig his soil was so hard it would bounce a golf ball off a drive 40 feet in the air. The grass was mixed dandelions and weeds. Now, and for several years now, after applying no herbicide, insecticide, fungicide, or fertilizer, it is a beautiful mix of bent and Dutch white clover. Several keys to his success are as follows.

1. In disobedience of a direct order from the golf course owner, he refused to kill the earthworms when they returned to the greens. Instead he went out every morning to roll the worm hills down. Eventually the worms "went away." He attributes that to the soil softening at deeper and deeper layers, thus giving the worms more volume to move around in.

2. He refused to spray herbicides to kill the dandelions. Mowing higher discouraged them and they are now gone.

3. He mowed the bentgrass higher than anyone recommends for the fairways and allows the grass to grow unmowed all week on the greens. His courses are only open on weekends so he mows on Friday. Before he mows during the growing season, the courses are a sea of white clover blossoms.

He has no watering system so he relies on Nature. So far so good. The only fertilizer he used was ordinary cracked corn. He only used that on certain greens as a test. Those greens did fine but they did not improve noticeably faster than the rest once he started mowing higher and less often.

Woodycrest attributes all the success he has had with raising his mowing height and changing the timing. If it was one person changing the mowing height on one lawn, I would discount that experience. This is many (many) acres under cultivation, lots of different greens, fairways, roughs, and traps. That's not to mention the pretty good stress it all gets on the weekends. It is also in Canada where he builds an ice skating rink just off the edge of the course in the lake. I think his experience and success is phenomenal.

Dave what can I say other than WOW?

That must be some popular course trying to put in ankle high grass and clover. You did notice the OP has a soil-less growing medium like a lot of courses use.

I have a putting green made from pure sand of 12-inches, and have Tifeagle Bermuda grass mowed with a greens mower.

The point I am driving at here is a soil less mix like mine you have to fertilize weekly, water and mow daily or at least mow every other day.

WOW! I know! His results do speak petty loudly. He mows it down to legal height on Friday so it is not deep except by Friday again.

I don't know what his soil is but he inherited it when he got the job. With the clover mix with bentgrass he does not fertilize. I'll see if I can find a picture or two. Unfortunately his messages to me are on an Outlook email system I quit using when it filled up and froze. I might have a converter but it would be on a different computer anyway. I'll get back on that.

Dave I have seen the pix over the years here. Impressive, but not applicable to the OP since he has a soil less mix.

Bent is not my thing really, but a lot of courses here have it and they loose it regularly due to fungal problems with drainage problems. They get a black organic layer that develops from improper top dressing using a fine sand that traps/holds water and causes root fungal problems that kills the Bent grass.

Only solution is to dig up the greens and rebuild them with a pure coarse sand and change top dressing procedures using the same sand as the base.

Bent is not my thing really, but a lot of courses here have it and they loose it regularly due to fungal problems with drainage problems.

I suspect they lose it because they are in violation of the first rule of gardening, grow plants adapted to your area. Bent is not adapted to Texas. That is pretty serious stubborn. Can't you get them on the bermuda bandwagon?

Heh. I've played at a course in Dallas area where they had bentgrass greens. Not surprisingly, they redid all the greens with dwarf bermuda. Initially, I had wondered why there are blowers around greens then later on I found out about bentgrass greens. Doesn't Masters course have bentgrass greens? Supposedly, they close down for the summer and open up rest of the year when it's cooler.

Thanks for all the input fellows>

Texas-weed, I have looked at alot of mowers. And they are selling what they call greens mowers for the back yard green for under a 1,000$ I dont no though it sounds a little to good to be true. They are just really small push mowers and the website says that they get down to the proper height for a putting green. I hope so because in the beginning I was shopping around for one and your right they were very expensive.

Doesn't Masters course have bentgrass greens?

Yes Lou Augusta National has bent grass greens, and no they do not shut down for summer.

However Augusta has both heating and cooling systems installed in the greens. They use a pro-mix of 50/50 peat/sand (not peat moss) and piping 12 inches below the surface for heating and cooling. The pump chilled water in the pipes during summer, and heated water in the winter.

I suspect they lose it because they are in violation of the first rule of gardening, grow plants adapted to your area.

There is some truth to that, but in north TX you will find about half of the courses do use Bent, and just about all of the upper end courses here use Bent.

The one course I mentioned, Lake Kiowa, had Bent for 15 years. However the superintendent didnÂt know squat about golf course management. For the last five years he tined aerated rather than plug core, and top dressed with sugar sand (very fine polished grains) vs. sharp sand. So what happened is the fine sand built up and trapped organic matter in about a 6-inch layer just below the surface and formed an impermeable barrier causing drainage to come to a halt. So the roots of the Bent would just rot.

Well the good news is they now have a new superintendent who knows what he is doing, and the better news is my sod farm won the bid for the sod only to replace all the greens with Tifeagle, tee boxes with Tifway sod, and 30 bushels per acre Tifway sprigs for all the fairways. Basically will be one of the best years ever or at least a good start for 2009 starting in May.

DUDE! Way to go!!

Well kind of, profit margin is razor thin to win the bid, but it will keep us very busy for 6 weeks.

"However Augusta has both heating and cooling systems installed in the greens. They use a pro-mix of 50/50 peat/sand (not peat moss) and piping 12 inches below the surface for heating and cooling. The pump chilled water in the pipes during summer, and heated water in the winter."

Well, what are we all waiting on then?!

Well, what are we all waiting on then?
I think a little golf tournament called the MASTERS.

I thought my neighbors had heaters in their lawns until I figured out they were just watering all winter.

Well, as soon as I have the Masters funding levels, I'll have grass that looks like theirs. I'm sure the lottery is going to come through for me any time now.

Just my $.02 on Augusta. Unless they've changed policies, even members never played the course until a few weeks before the Masters for practice rounds, then they generally had 4-5 weeks for member play, then several community tournaments (press, W/E for the Masters volunteers, etc) until around June 15th when they closed the course. They opened it up again for only membership play sometime in early October.

With different ruling regimes at one of the most beautiful places on earth (Augusta National Golf Club)...this may have chenged, but it never did for the 40+ years I went.

BTW, that property that Augusta National now sits on was once a very prominent nursery (Berkmans) that imported exotic plants from all over the world that we now have in our country today:
" Louis Berkmans nursery in Augusta, by the way, called "Fruitlands," was one of the two largest nurseries in the South before the Civil War, the other being in Richmond, Virginia. In his 1861 catalogue, Berkmans listed 1,300 varieties of pears, 900 apples, 300 grapes, 300 peaches, 100 camellias and 100 azaleas. Many of the varieties of camellias and azaleas he cultivated for outdoor culture he imported from Belgium, Germany, France,and Japan."

Wow, those numbers are staggering. With shipping much slower back in those days, it makes you wonder how they managed to have enough volume to keep that kind of inventory.

Do we even have 1300 varieties of pears to choose from with a whole internet to order from today?

How did we get off on Augusta? Taking care of a bentgrass green is a lot of work for the homeowner. The mowing, the fertilizing, the aerating, top dressing, etc. Even taking care of a walk behind reel mower is a chore because you need to keep the blades razor sharp to mow at those low setting constantly. I would be extremely impressed if you could keep the green in good shape for a year. The fact that you didn't have time to mow in a while indicates that you may not be able to be attentive enough to this high maintenance situation. For a fertilizer, use soluble or liquid ferts with high amounts of K to promote lateral growth during warm stretches and spood feed it with nitrogen on a regular basis to keep it green and aggressive. The more aggressive, the more maintenance though. It's a vicious cycle.

How did we get off on Augusta?

Well because regardless if the green is Bent or Bermuda, it takes a lot of money, time, didication, and effort to maintain a golf green. I have had a golf green for 20 or more years, and it has evolved from Tifgdwarf > Tifgreen > Tifeagle,

A homeowner can do it but never likely to achieve golf course quality greens.

Heck I am still tossing the idea of building my own golf course on some of my property, but the expense is staggering. I mean each green can cost in excess of $100K just to build the darn thing to USGA specs, not to mention maintenance and upkeep.