COURSE REPORT

July

Another month of pretty continuous hot and dry weather forming part of a 60-day period with no rainfall recorded. Our main focus was to keep the surfaces within our control maintained to the best possible standards, with moisture and nutrient levels as well as the application of water retention products being key to achieving this. Through such a prolonged period of hot weather, our water resources depleted quite quickly and we are now using mains water to irrigate, covering greens and tees with any spare used for the approaches and for hand watering hotspots.

August

Greens:  We have greens maintenance week starting on the 20th of the month, where we will look to hollow core, top dress and over seed.  We will be hollow coring all greens and deep aerating using verti drain on greens 1, 4, 6, 8 and 9. This will be followed by a topdressing of sand where we will look to put 3 tonnes per green down. Before a final light dressing, we will over seed using a ‘bent’ seed. As we missed out on any renovation work in the spring maintenance week due to the wet conditions, it is particularly important to carry out these works.

When hollow tining, we are removing thatch from the upper profile, relieving compaction and improving surface drainage, creating more air spaces and releasing unwanted gasses such as ‘carbon dioxide’.  At the moment, the grass species on the greens is predominantly ‘Poa annua’ but through carrying out the correct practices over a number of years we are seeing an increased amount of ‘bent’ grass, which is a much more desirable species to have on a golf green. 

We will look to increase this further by over seeding during greens maintenance week and continue this over the coming years.

A greens maintenance work schedule will be sent out separately to this report.

Tees:  The tees will be aerated using a ¾ inch solid tine.  Regular divoting will continue and we will spray with iron, seaweed, and a growth regulator. 

Approaches:  Some approaches have struggled through the hot and dry weather, and so we will look to overseed the approaches, followed by a topdressing and granular feed.

Fairways:  We will look to overseed fairways using a machine, which we will hire.

Semi rough/rough: We will look to overseed struggling areas.

Path work:  As growth had slowed down to pretty much nothing we decided to start the back of 18th green project, including installing a new shoe cleaning area.  The path is now installed, and we are now working on the shoe cleaning area itself. The concreting work will soon be completed and we are waiting on a specialist company to make the grate to cover the pit. We will also look to install a new cabinet for the compressor. It is looking likely to be September before completion.

Mark Ogden

Course Manager