July Update

As I type the sun is shining and the wind is drying out the course nicely. The weather recently could be described as a mixed bag. We have had bright sunshine, cold winds, torrential rainfall and three recent play suspensions for heavy fog, in July!!

 

What this means for the playing surfaces is that they don't really know whether they are coming or going. The greens are either, cold, burning up, drowning in rainfall or somewhere in between. So it is a fine balance to try and keep everything in the best possible condition.

 

 

Fog over the 2nd green

 

The team are all working extremely hard to try and maintain the course to the highest possible standard. We are trying to keep on top of things as much as possible which is difficult in a busy calendar for golf play. There has been some recent nice comments from members and visitors regarding the course condition and we are thankful for that.

 

The greens are performing well and the little and often approach to topdressing and feeding is working well. The new sprayer is coming into its own and making light work of what we ask of it. We are trying to maintain a quick pace throughout this busy period with lots of important competitions and knock outs being played. We can achieve this through double cutting the greens and using the iron too. It is very time consuming but the results are there for everyone to see. We are monitoring the speed so that we can strike a happy medium between having a good pace for general play, but not going to quick that the pace becomes unplayable.

 

The tees have never looked as good as they do now and again that is down to a lot of hard work. Heavy fertiliser, a growth regulator, brushing and cutting regularly have meant that we have been able to present a better surface. The height of the tees and approaches has been brought down as low as 8 mm. The fertiliser helped the tees to grow very strong and with the use of the growth regulator, the top growth is controlled, enabling the tees to thicken up. Regular brushing has meant we could stand up the coarser grasses to achieve a nicer cut. Regular sharpening of the cutting cylinders has also helped.

 

Tees and fairways improvement

 

Having invested heavily in the equipment this spring, we can already see some good improvements on the fairways. They are being cut as regularly as time allows and for the first time in my tenure they have been fed. Having spiked them in the spring, the fairways were scarified using the new TerraRake, which helped to pull out a lot of thatchy material. This will be done again at the end of the summer. This process helps the fairways to breathe and produce a better surface. There is much work to do on the fairways but we have made a decent start. We have sprayed a soluble fertiliser and iron to help give the fairways a better appearance and this will be applied again shortly.

 

1st fairway definition

 

At the end of the summer the deep rough areas will be cut down again and collected. Then we will use the rake again to pull more thatchy material out so that the rough starts to thin out. The eventual aim is to achieve a wispy rough where you can walk in and find your ball without a problem. A long way to go but it can be achieved.

 

Off the course we are busy planning budgets for next year and looking at what jobs we are going to carry out during the winter period. This will be updated at a later date.