How Much Green for a Green?

A dream of every golfer I know is to have their own course in their back yard. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have the money or the acreage required to put in a whole golf course. Additionally, we probably couldn’t find the time to either maintain it ourselves or hire someone else to do it. One popular alternative though, is installing a professional practice green in the back yard. We here at USGolfer love this idea. So as a service to you, our viewing public, we have decided we would do the work for you and look into the actual costs for installing your own backyard practice green. Let me start by saying that there is a solution out there for almost anyone’s budget, so we will try to cover as many people as possible.

The first question someone has to ask himself or herself when considering an addition like this is, "Do I want the real deal or is synthetic right for me?" Well here’s the scoop with a real green. The most popular type of grass used on greens in cooler climates is bent grass. To have a green professionally installed will cost you $25,000 and up depending on size and labor involved. You can save a lot of money by doing all the work yourself. A good place to start if you do want to plant your own green is www.putting-greens.com. This site is devoted to the do it yourselfer who wants the real deal without all of the costs involved. By doing all the work yourself you can get a real bent grass green planted in your back yard for a few hundred dollars. The essentials, such as seed, hole cutters, flags, and Instruction manual will only cost about $100 dollars, but a hand mower will cost at least $300.

Sounds too good to be true? Well it is in a way. There are additional costs involved with having a real green such as fertilization, irrigation, fungicide, herbicide, pesticide, core aeration, mowing, and top dressing. These are more time consuming than they are expensive, but they must be done if you want your green to be playable. So if you don’t have the time to spend on all the maintenance required with a real green, your next best bet is synthetic.

Amazingly enough, synthetic greens have come a long way since the day of the green nylon floor coverings used on decks and doormats. The technology has advanced to a level that is comparable in feel and roll to an actual bent grass green. Of course the more money you spend the more life-like the green actually is. The downside of synthetic greens is their cost. Just for the turf alone the cost varies from $3.00 per square foot up to $7.00 per square foot. Even for a small 200 square foot putting surface, the cost starts around $600 just for the turf. If you want a fairly large 1800 square foot green, the cost starts out around $5000 dollars. Now installing one of these bad boys isn’t terribly difficult, but it is time consuming. The best estimate for time to install a green is around 2 or 3 days for a small green and a little longer for the larger more elaborate greens. Installation time is totally dependent on the amount of pre-installation work that must be completed, such as moving top soil, elevating the green area, creating slope and undulation in a green, etc. For step by step information on installing your own synthetic green check out this site for the do it yourselfer, http://www.diynet.com.

The final option is to have someone professionally install a synthetic green for you. This can be fairly expensive, but if money is not an issue, this is the way to go. Most installed greens range in price from $3000 for a small 150 square foot green to $25000 for a large 2000 square foot green. Now the price can get more expensive if you choose fancier turf. This may seem like a steep price, but the benefit of having little or no maintenance for your green may make this cost a little easier to stomach. There are a few different manufacturers of synthetic greens and each one has a list of authorized installers and dealers across the country. Here is a list of a few manufacturers and their websites:

Field Turf, http://www.grass-tech.com/index.html
United Turf industries, http://www.unitedturf.com/index.html
All Pro Greens, http://www.allprogreens.com/

We hope you enjoy the process of putting in your back yard green. If you do put one in, take a photo of yourself and the green, send it to usgolfer.net and will be proud to feature you on our site.

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