Summer Time

September 24, 2019

It’s been a busy time since the last blog post.

Mid August we were able to complete our first maintenance on the greens for the year. The greens were scarified to a depth of 10mm and then 30 tonnes of dressing sand was applied, by doing this we aim to, among other things, improve the drainage in the greens and firm up the surface ahead of the autumn and winter. Both these objectives will aid us with disease prevention through the cooler seasons. Another maintenance week is planned for mid October to that we can get as much dressing into the greens as possible before the temperature drops too much.

It’s been a very dry few months and we are roughly 8 inches behind the our rainfall totals for last year at this point. Despite this the course has held up really well and we are in better shape than we were last year which is a great as that’s the challenge we set ourselves each year. Next year we will be adding a wetting agent program to the fairway maintenance program. This will help us make the most of our irrigation system and any rain that comes. From a playing point of view it will mean that we shall have more consistent surfaces on the fairway and will help tackle the patchy areas that appear in the drier periods of the year. I’ll come back to next years plans for various areas in a later blog.

We have been out with the sprayers a lot recently, we are very fortunate to have two sprayers that enable us to cover the course in a shorter space of time meaning we can get more product out to aid us present a better playing surface. Over the last couple of weeks we have applied a liquid feed to all the fairways, approaches and tees, wetting agent to the greens and tees, a couple of liquid feeds to the greens and lastly applied the first of the fungicides in our disease prevention program.

Currently we are working on tidying and clearing around the lakes to improve visibility and playability around them. We will continue to leave areas natural for the wildlife but will be cutting back a few over grown trees and clear some rushes that are expanding to far into the lakes and choking the ecosystem. We will also be taking some of the Lythrum (pink flower) from around the 11th lake to plant around the 14th lake, this will add some colour to the lake edges and mean that we can clear the view to green on 11 without wasting the plants.

That’s it for now. The next blogs will focus on the new fleet and plans for winter and next year.

Take care

Please repair, replace and rake