I often wonder how they do things at the Gabriola Golf Course. Is it a typical golf course, using lots of chemical herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers to maintain the perfect fairway? Or does the management refuse to use chemical products in order to reduce the environmental impact of the course?

The New York Times published an article about an all organic golf course the other day:

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. (…)

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. [continue]

Is the Gabriola Golf Course doing this kind of thing?

(The New York Times article I quoted above is available at https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/sports/golf/17vineyard.html?pagewanted=all, but now they require you to register in order to read it. Bah! Or you can borrow a login and password from Bug Me Not instead.)

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