Sometimes it takes ingenuity to rid a golf course of nasty weeds. Occasionally, it takes goats.
That’s what George Wright Golf Course in Boston’s Hyde Park section did for about two-and-a-half months last summer, when maintenance crews couldn’t access numerous areas overgrown with poison ivy, sumac, buckthorn and knotweed. To goats, this superintendent’s dilemma was a feast in waiting.
“We were looking at ‘going green,’ so one of the ideas was bringing in goats,” recounts head professional Scott Allen. “They do a great job. They’ll eat anything. They cleaned the entire right side of the ninth hole down to the ground.”
Three herds were used during the process, with as many as 11 goats working at once. Along the way, the staff learned that goats are also competitive; productivity increased when more goats were added to the workforce.
“They work in teams,” Allen says. “When they get the bottom picked out, they’ll go for higher things. They’ll find a tall sapling, one of them will jump up, lean on it and knock it down, and the others will start eating it. They took turns doing that.”
To corral the brush-clearing crews, the maintenance staff enclosed 30-foot-by-30-foot sections of minimally electric fence, which they moved to new overgrown areas about once weekly. The goats were never in-play for golfers and, in fact, players never even saw the animals until they ate so much of the underbrush in certain areas that the goats became somewhat visible.
“There are no cons with hiring goats,” Allen says. “The goats do things nobody else can, or wants to, do. They’re quiet, and the mess they make is so small it just disappears. It’s amazing. We’re probably going to do it again in 2016.”