Will a back yard putting green work using traditional methods?There are many ways to build a back yard putting green, going from full USGA specifications to the traditional pushup method. If you are doing-it-yourself, by far the cheapest and easiest way to build a green is the way they did it 100 years ago. On this page I will concentrate on determining if your location and soil is adequate for a push-up back yard putting green. Depending on your budget, a push-up green may mean different things. In days long past, they were places that extra material was piled and shaped into the green site. That worked then because those old courses often had 4 to 5 foursomes per hour on a busy day, and cut greens at a ¼ of an inch, so poor soil was less of a problem. With good soil (mostly sandy with good infiltration) a back yard putting green should do well without too much trouble. If the soils are heavier (higher clay content) then a subsurface drainage should probably be put-in and the native soils may need to be modified by adding sandy material, or simply importing better material for the rootzone. One simple way to test your soil infiltration rate is to take two similar buckets. On one cut the bottom off and jam it in the ground with a mallet deep enough so water cannot escape from the sides at the bottom. Then fill the other with 10 inches of water. Poor that water into the first bucket and start a watch. If it takes less than 1 hour, you have an infiltration rate of over 10 inches per hour and you are ready to go. If not, you need to calculate your infiltration rate as follows: Take any minutes and divide them by 60 to get a decimal, add that decimal to the number of hours it took. Example; if it took 2 hours and 35 minutes: then 35 ÷ 60 = .58, so your time in decimal form is 2.58 hours Now take your 10 inch rainfall and divide by the time it took to infiltrate to get your infiltration rate in inches per hour. Example; following the example above: 10 ÷ 2.58 = 3.87 or 3.87 inches per hour infiltration rate. Anything less than 4 inches per hour may require additional drainage. Anywhere below 2 inches per hour and some modification of the soil may be helpful. If the test is poor, try removing the top layer of material, to get below the organic layer and try again, organic material will reduce infiltration significantly. Now you can confidently move to the next step which is to actually design and then build that back yard putting green.
If you have more questions about the suitability of your site for a back yard putting green, contact me!
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