I mentioned in my post of October 10th that my team and I were previewing properties at Andalusia in La Quinta. Take a look at my photo here and you’ll see that most of the golf course except for the putting surface looks brown. This is the norm in the desert as each fall our golf courses make a transition from summer to winter grass. This process is called over seeding.
Summer To Winter Grass Over Seeding
To start the over seeding process a golf course stops watering the fairways (not the putting surfaces though) and the summer grass soon goes dormant or brown. The existing summer grass is then cut very low which is called scalping. The last step is applying the winter grass seed and then turning the sprinklers back on.
The new winter grass comes in pretty fast. And even though I’ve seen this process over many years, the rapid transformation from brown to green each fall continues to be pretty cool to see.
We Get Scalped Next Week
Local homeowners with lawns usually have their gardeners complete the same process, of course on a much smaller scale than the golf courses. Our gardener will be starting our own lawn over seeding next week and he’ll be planting our winter flowers this month as well.
And come next summer when our desert temps heat up, this winter grass will be taken over by the dormant summer grass, with no scalping required.