CommonGround Golf Course has healthy greens, neatly trimmed fairways and a rough that blends in seamlessly with its surroundings.
It’s also kept green with recycled water — for about a third of the price of potable water.
“Most people have no idea we’re using (recycled) water,” said Tracy Richard, director of agronomy at CommonGround. “You’d never know by looking at the golf course.”
When crews redeveloped CommonGround Golf Course, at the site of the former Mira Vista Golf Course southeast of Lowry, developers took steps to make the course as water-efficient and environmentally friendly as possible.
They hooked onto Denver Water’s recycled water system so the course could irrigate with recycled water. They installed a weather station to help adjust the course’s irrigation schedules, planted low-water-use grass in the rough and transplanted more than 100 trees from the site’s former golf course. They even used recycled asphalt for the cart paths and turned old trees into mulch and wood chips to use on other parts of the course.
“Golf courses have a bit of a reputation as being water hogs,” Richard said. Improving that reputation by using recycled water and reusing materials from the old course “is clearly the environmentally friendly thing to do.”
Denver Water continues to add customers to its recycled water system each year. Once the recycled water system’s build-out is complete, the project will supply more than five billion gallons of recycled water annually for irrigation, industrial and commercial uses — freeing up enough drinking water to serve about 42,500 households each year.
Recycled water, which is treated to state health standards but should not be consumed, is cheaper than treated drinking water. Richard said CommonGround uses about 90 million gallons of water each summer to irrigate its 130 acres of turf. It pays less than 90 cents per thousand gallons of recycled water.
A golf course that uses Denver Water potable water to irrigate would have to pay $3.17 per thousand gallons of water in the summer — more than three times the amount of recycled water, said John Wright, Denver Water’s manager of rate administration.
Despite the discounted rate for using recycled water, Richard said the course makes every effort not to waste water.
“We’re still trying to conserve and use water judicially,” he said.
CommonGround built a pond on the course that can store about 20 acre-feet of recycled water before it is pumped to the course’s irrigation system. The irrigation system is automated and adjusts according to weather and precipitation readings from the course’s weather station. Members of the grounds crew inspect the turf, watch for over-watered or under-watered areas and look for places where the sprinkler system may be malfunctioning.
“We don’t trust our irrigating completely to computers,” Richard said. “There’s still no substitute for seeing first-hand what turf looks like.”
They also use successful cultural practices, such as aerating the soil and using proper amounts of fertilizer and calcium, to keep the grass and soil healthy. In 2009, the golf course partnered with Colorado State University in a two-year study to determine what changes occur when soil once irrigated with potable water is later irrigated with recycled water.
Richard said the course’s owners, the Colorado Golf Association and the Colorado Women’s Golf Association, proved they could build a golf course using materials on hand and recycled water, “and still have an outstanding golf course at the end of the day.”
— Story and photos by Ann Depperschmidt, Community Relations