Why you should hire the professionals, and why Southwest Greens of Jacksonville is leader in the industry for installation practices.

You might be asking yourself, “Can I install artificial grass myself?” While it’s possible for you to install artificial grass yourself, it isn’t easy. The tools and equipment needed are costly, it takes a long time to do it yourself, and you risk voiding your warranty. Let’s take a look at why you need to have your artificial golf turf professionally installed and artificial turf installation best practices.

WHY PROFESSIONAL ARTIFICIAL GRASS INSTALLATION

Whether you’re adding an artificial golf green to your personal property, or you manage a commercial golf course, having artificial turf installed professionally will save you headaches, time, and money — and, over time, give you a better-looking green.

Saved Time

Even small DIY projects can often evolve into a big deal. We’ve all been there. Excessive trips to the big box store for tools or supplies we didn’t realize we’d need, plans not going accordingly, many days of laborious work? When you have your turf installed by a pro, you’ll save a lot of time, and you will enjoy the greens sooner.

To properly install artificial golf greens, must level the ground, add a base of crushed aggregate, add padding, lay the turf, add infill, and roll the turf for the best playability and to make it look as real as possible. Cutting edges for clean borders can also be challenging and needs a good deal of experience to get just right. All of this necessitates some very specific tools and knowledge to install correctly to avoid wonky sections and/or edges that end up peeling up creating unpleasant aesthetics.

Difficult Soil/Landscape

Perfect soil is scarce. Many property owners can attest to this. It is very rare to be able to sink your shovel into the soil without issues. Instead, we struggle with stones, clay, or soil filled with root systems from nearby plants and trees in many places. Digging alone can become grueling work. Worse, if you are cutting into roots, you could be damaging surrounding trees you might want to keep.

We’ve had to deal with obstacles like large boulders, old (or new) irrigation lines, and tree stumps on many of our installation projects. Each of these items must be repurposed or removed. Excavation can also produce tons of soil you don’t have a use for — what is your plan to deal with it? We regularly have to move this unwanted soil offsite.

A professional installer can address all of this for you. So if you’re not wanting to do very difficult manual labor or don’t know what to do with your excavated soil, hiring an installation professional for your project is your best option.

Large Areas

When installing a golf green in a large area, seaming becomes among the most difficult elements of the turf to get right. This is the process of combining two or more pieces together. Seeming is similar to carpet installation, when turf seams are blended the right way, they are not noticeable. Seams that aren’t blended correctly will stand out and provide a terrible looking finished product.

Picture this: rolling a poster or piece of paper. Have you always gotten perfect alignment when trying to pull-off a good roll? Sometimes you don’t get a clean edge, but end up with paper sticking out on one side. This same process can happen with seaming artificial turf. One small misstep early on will ruin the whole project and look terrible when finished. A professional installer will have a lot of experience doing seams and will make sure everything looks amazing before they’re finished.

THE SOUTHWEST GREENS WAY

There are three distinct things that separate Southwest Greens of Jacksonville from others in the turf industry — craftsmanship, guarantees, and customer service. We don’t believe in generic artificial turf installations, and because of this, we’ve mastered the art and the science of Jacksonville artificial turf installation. We have perfected our process with at least 6,000 golf greens across the globe under our belts.

Take a quick look at how our artificial putting green installation process works.

• A base made of crushed aggregate, which, unlike concrete, can be moistened and molded to make challenging breaks and undulations.
• Then we install a cushion pad, at a minimum, to help the ball roll and shot absorption, then we bring in our state-of-the-art polypropylene turf material that is used to replicate the bright green color, softness, and playability of natural grass.
• Then we in-fill the turf with a formulation of fine-coated silica sand which gives it the touch and feel of natural grass.
• Finally, roll the tops to make the effect of real bent grass green. Options include installing first and second cuts fringe, sand traps, bunkers, fairways, and roughs.

Watch our video on our installation process here.

READY FOR YOUR GREENS?

Be sure to take a look at our grass collections. We are here to help when you are ready. Contact us for a quote on your project — whether it is a backyard putting green or a full-blown golf course, we’ve got you covered.