Start of a busy week

After the weekend the course has dried up well. Drying winds and no further rain has enabled us to get all the holes open, the holes closed from the flooding have dried up well and are back open.

Now we can get on the course without causing damage we have a lot of work lined up over the next 2 weeks. 

Firstly we are trying to resolve an ongoing problem with the back left of the 16th green. There are pine trees close to the green which dry the turf out in summer, and in a low area water collects making the turf very wet after rain or after irrigation to help keep the turf alive from the pines. The solution a ring drain/root barrier in one. 

The ring drain will help take drainage water from the wet areas and the green and whilst the trench is open we are installing a root barrier membrane to prevent further roots progressing onto the greens surface. Adam and rob started this today and the compaction and root infestation was very high so going was slow, but this is an area of high traffic wear. 

The irrigation pipe also crossed through the trench 

Roots on the surround

We also have a mini excavator on hire to carry out a number of other jobs. An old soak away left of the first was causing issues as it was backing up during wet weather so we extended the pipe into nearby wood land so the water could discharge easily. 

This will be filled in in the morning 

Once the trench had been dug we moved on to the 4th green side bunker which is prone to water logging. 

The reason is due to springs which come out from the hillside channelling into the bunker. The right hand side bunker had a similar problem, we fixed that by digging through a clay seem exposing the limestone beneath which is free draining. We thought a similar approach would work again, however we discovered in the middle of the bunker the clay seem was extremely deep. 

At around 5 foot we decided that we could not dig any deeper. We did find some stone within the bunker so dug down to expose as much as we could. This project will continue tomorrow. 

Other work has been thinning low branches on the 26th hole. 

Installing open gulley drains to the 17th and 8th surrounds. 

Incorpating the sprinkler head

We also vibrate rolled the greens and continued with cutting hedges.