10/7/2020 - By William Buehn

Take a quick peek into Doug Palm’s cart and you might find yourself wondering why it looks like he’s heading to the local laundromat. Lately, the Cattails Golf Club superintendent has been rolling around with enough detergent bottles to tackle laundry duty for a high-school football team. But clearly that’s not what he’s using them for. Instead, he’s discovered the perfect turf role for his repurposed detergent bottles—filling divots.

As many superintendents do, Palm has always made his rounds with some sand and seed in the cart, just in case he comes across some areas that need to be filled in. But he’s always struggled with keeping his mix contained. Over the years, he’s played around with different containers (from simple buckets to golf cart sand bottles, and even coffee containers), but the mix was always either spilling in the cart, getting wet, or just not pouring quite right. Needless to say, he was having a little trouble finding his Goldilocks container. Then one day, he realized that the answer to his troubles had been sitting right under his nose the whole time—and it smelled a lot like Tropical Rainforest. He says, “I was doing laundry one day, washing out my [detergent bottle] and going, “Wow this pours out nice,” and I just thought, you know, I'm going to try to put some sand in it.” Well, the easy pour bottle—which he triple-rinsed of course—turned out to be just right for his Divot Recovery Mix (DRM). Ten thousand Twitter views later and it seems like he’s onto something.

The bottle might not be the best option for every situation, like dedicated efforts to fill in divots on the range or the par 3’s (the bottles just don’t hold quite enough for those larger jobs), but for Palm, it’s proved to be super convenient for hitting divots while he’s out making his rounds. For him, it’s an easy way to help out his crew, adding “I'll hit spots in fairways like landing areas when I'm out. I can be watering one spot and just dump a [bottle] of that out and fill 20 divots…and I'll hit the par-3 tees as I'm going along, you know, because I have it, it's right there and it's just super quick.”

Right now, Palm is also doing some experimenting to really dial in the whole process, streamlining fill-up methods and testing out different size detergent bottles. He’s got the fill-up process down to a science too. To make it quick and easy, he just puts a few bottles in a 5-gallon bucket and pours the DRM straight over top, paying little mind to the mix that misses the containers; the bucket will catch that overflow, and it can be used for the next round. As far as bottle size goes, so far, the medium bottles have yielded the best balance of convenience and divots-filled. These 30 laundry-load detergent bottles can usually fill about 20 healthy divots—not a bad ratio! The bigger containers he’s tested are too cumbersome for pouring and the smaller ones only fill a couple divots. So, what’s the golden ratio of laundry-load-to-divots-filled? Only time will tell. Nevertheless, although Palm may still have some trialing left to do, at least he won’t be running out of clean clothes any time soon.