Following the hottest and driest spring on record, golf courses across the UK are facing unprecedented challenges in maintaining healthy fairways. With drought conditions, heatwaves, and heavy play taking their toll, DLF Seeds is equipping golf course managers with expert advice and proven seed solutions to safeguard fairways for the seasons ahead.
For turf managers, this isn’t a one-off challenge — it’s the new pattern. Fairways, in particular, have taken a hit with heavy traffic and hydrophobic ‘dry patch’ soils slowing recovery and reducing the overseeding window. Beneath the surface, next season’s outcomes are already being decided so what can you do create surfaces than not only survive, but thrive?
Stuart Yarwood, Regional Technical Manager at DLF Seeds, has some advice to offer course managers about how they can protect their courses against the impact of future dry spells through intelligent turf management.
“Resilience isn’t about one species — it’s about balance,” he says. “Each grass brings unique strengths and, when blended intelligently, they create swards that can survive drought, recover faster and maintain presentation.
“The deep roots and rolled leaves of Fescues provide natural drought tolerance. Slender & Strong Creeping Red deliver rhizomatous recovery; Chewings provides fineness and root mass, while Hard and Sheep’s add density on poorer soils. The creeping roots of Bents provide stability, boost drought recovery and wear tolerance, all with low inputs, while Ultrafine Ryegrasses provide rapid establishment and resilience to traffic, ideal for situations where fast cover is critical.”
Botanical diversity is an insurance policy: if one species falters, others fill the gap. This strategy forms the backbone of mixture formulation, with each Johnsons Sports Seed and Masterline mix from DLF a carefully tuned orchestra of grasses working in harmony to protect your surfaces from whatever the climate throws next.
J Sustain Fairway is the ultimate ‘Climate Guardian’, with a five-fescue blend of Hard, Slender, Strong, Chewings and Sheep’s working together like a defensive line. J Fescue is a smooth, balanced and adaptable all-rounder for greens, tees, approached and fairways, while J Premier Fairway is a focused, premium fescue cocktail for fairways that provides consistency, density and top-class presentation.
The new 2025 formulation of Johnson’s J Fairway is another gamechanger – featuring 5% Teetop Browntop Bent which equates to 10 million plants per bag! Its creeping roots stitch fairways together for outstanding resilience and accelerated recovery. And when traffic is high and recovery needs to be fast, the J Ultrafine Rye range is your emergency service – available with 25%, 50% or 100% ultrafine rye for superior play and presentation. For coastal conditions, you can consider the 100% Slender Creeping Red fescue blend of J Links – salt-tolerant, wind-tough and bred for true links authenticity.
With autumn providing the ideal conditions for overseeding, Yarwood urges course managers to take proactive steps now: assess fairway conditions, match seed choice to site requirements, relieve compaction, aerate to encourage deeper rooting, and use wetting agents to rehydrate profiles. Protecting new seedlings from traffic and setting realistic golfer expectations are also key to successful recovery.
“This year has been brutal, but intelligent overseeding is your defence,” concludes Yarwood. “By combining botanical diversity, best-practice turf management, and DLF’s unmatched seed purity, golf course managers can future-proof their fairways for resilience, playability, and sustainability.”