Growth spurt

Since my last blog things have been a little hectic to say the least. A week ago things were looking dry and we had to deal with the irrigation system playing up, following a dry week or so we have had two spells of rain, the first on Saturday which brought 10mm of rain and the second around 7mm last Wednesday. This has kick started the spring growth. All the grass was waiting for is to get the right soil temperatures and the right amount of moisture and it will grow. This is now evident across the course with most areas growing rapidly and we are finding it challenging to get on top of all areas. 

In simple terms when you get heat and water at the same time that creates growth. In a more scientific view, we call the relationship between soil/ air temperature levels throughout the day and moisture 'growth potential'.

Basically when the temperature reaches a level that a grass can grow at it's maximum, given the right supply of nutrients, water and light, this is it's maximum growth potential. We can control the amount of nutrients and water to some level, and using plant growth regulators we can regulate growth. 

This will start to be applied next week. This should take the flush of growth from playing surfaces. Tees, surrounds and approaches are to be sprayed also.

The priority this week has been cutting the intermediate rough , between holes and around landing areas. The areas which are not cut at all are really thick and lush, my advice would be to avoid these areas. The reason these are left to grow up long is that we have selected areas which we feel are out of play for the majority of golfers, that saves us time to concentrate on the in play areas and ensure we get all maintenance needed done within the time we have. Our staff levels are very tight for the size of course and we feel that the most important areas, i.e. greens, surrounds, tees, fairways and semi takes priority and the majority of our time and effort is directed to those.

We also cut fairways, cut copses, cut bunker faces, cut the range, picked up balls, moved holes, cut semi, clipped around sprinkler heads and as mentioned above cut rough with the tractor mounted deck. Will has also been busy strimming around hard to reach areas

After the winter we have just experienced we are vertidraining a number of areas which are very compacted and after only a little rain stand water. The compaction is caused by foot traffic and machinery when the soil is very wet, the wet conditions increases the amount of surface compaction. To relieve it, the vertidrain heaves the soil structure creating fractures and air spaces which allow the soil to drain much more freely. The main areas of concern were the 10th and 9th fairways, the 1st semi and around a number of greens. Hopefully this should improve the grass coverage in those areas also.

Tine and dress

This week we have made really good progress aerating the greens, as mentioned in previous posts this was long overdue, coupled with the fact that we have been having irrigation issues has meant we were struggling to get on to them to carry out any work. Now we have had some of the irrigation fixed, which I will cover more of in this blog, we have aerated the greens with cross tines. These are 150mm long and 12mm in diameter, the cross shape causes less disruption to the surface than a round solid tine of 12mm diameter, however with this being the only opportunity to carry out aeration this spring I felt the usual 8mm tines would not give sufficient benefits to the soil from a single or double pass operation. The greens have been done once on 1-18 and twice on 19-27 at a 50mm x 50mm spacing. Greens 1-18 will be done for the second time during Thursday and Friday and then top dressed for the 3rd time at the start of next week. This will then conclude the mini renovation works for the spring, with the next planned aeration in August where they will be hollow tined and solid tined to various depths. In between times there will be additional topdressings applied.

The tees on 1-18 have also been top dressed heavily to help fill in winter wear and divots that have not healed. They were brushed following the dressing to help work it in to the sward.

The irrigation contractor has now installed 4 new wires to replace faulty stretches of cable. This has not solved the issue we are having with deterioration and lack of signal to certain boxes as the 5th 21st and 24th green are still not responding to electrical signal. Putting more cable in could solve the problem, however this is expensive and is not guaranteed to solve the electrical problem completely.
Since the electrical fault we have since had a burst in the pipework near the 23rd green which is still to be fixe. the system would need draining to glue this joint.

19-27 bunkers are being edged this week and will be finished today. Unfortunately due to new restrictions the bunker sand which we have on order has been delayed for a few weeks due to transport regulations in and out of the particular quarry. This means the bunkers that are short of sand cant be topped up until we can receive the bunker sand.

Irrigation woes

This sunny dry weather certainly put everyone in better spirits, so much better than week after week of watch rain fall and see the course waterlogged. However it has highlighted one problem we have been battling with over the last few weeks, we have been having issues with the wiring on the irrigation system, the system itself is nearing 40 years old and the wiring along with the pipe work are showing signs of deterioration. The pipework we have known for a while to have issues with the glue joints breaking under pressure. However this spring when the system was opened up we had a number of faults appear on the computer which controls the decoders to turn the sprinklers on and off. These error codes showed us that the signal was not getting through to a number of greens. After a lot of testing we initially though we isolated the problem to 2 areas, where the wire ran between boxes behind the 7th green and the 4th green and between boxes 15th green and 15th tee.

The irrigation contractors then mole ploughed a wire in to replace these 2 sections.m Once complete the system was tested again only to find the signal was getting to more greens but not them all. Testing each decoder after that we established that corrosion, earthing and fatigued cable was weakening the signal passing through the existing cabling, normally a constant voltage of 30v is needed we found a fluctuating current of between 1 and 20 volts. This was why we were not getting power to the furthest of the greens. We have since mole ploughed another section of cable in to get power to all but 3 greens. We are now at a point where we are deciding the best way forward in making the system useable.

Unfortunately when ploughing in a cable the contractors hit the tank fill pipe which left us withouitn water for a couyple of days a flooded the 15th faiway.

Given the dry weather the greens have suffered as a result. A lot of hand watering has had to be done to keep some greens alive.

Now we have water to most greens we have started to verticut to remove quite a build up of lateral growth. We have also microtined with star tines to minimise surface disruption and lightly topdressed with straight sand. This will be repeated next week, when we hope to get a fertiliser on the greens to promote recovery from the winter wear.

The area levelled at the end of the range has now been seed and raked. This should grow in once we get some rain.

Busy prep week

Well since the last blog we seem to have finally ended winter and gone straight into summer. Last week we had over an inch of snow and today (Sunday) it's the hottest day of the year at 24 degrees. 

Last week we had a lot of work to do as it was a short week and we had the pro am on Friday. First of all we had to make sure we cut the course fully and then put in an extra cut on the Friday morning so the course was looking it's best. This wasn't just for the day but we would have cut everything for general play. Given the better weather the course had come on a lot. We have seen a lot better growth bathe areas where it grows more are in sheltered spots as these hold moisture better. 

The downside to the drier hot weather is that the areas of winter damage are not going to recover as these are hard dry and growth is still poor. We need to keep fertilising and hope we get spells of wetter wether that keeps moisture in  the soil more. 

I know it's crazy after such a wet winter and spring I'm asking for moisture but it's amazing how the surface dries given breeze and warm temperatures. This is where most of the root systems are. The poorer grasses such as pop annua rely on a shallow rootsystem. Given most of our greens are mostly poa annua we are already needing to apply water to some of the sandier based greens.   

The biggest headache is that the automatic side of the irrigation system still has a couple of faults. Meaning we have to water by hand and this takes time and has to be done in the day whereas the automatic system delivers water through the night. Watering in the night is also more beneficial as it does not evaporate as much as watering in the day. We hope to get the faults fixed this week. 

Else where the course is looking good, the white tees are now ok for use generally. The range grass tee is also open. We hope to take preferred lies off this week. 

The height of greens and fairways have been lowered slightly to there normal summer levels. 

We hope to start micro tining and top dressing the greens this coming week.  

They are long overdue and in desperate need of some aeration. I appreciate it won't be welcomed by golfers but it's due to the poor weather and the sheer amount of play in poor conditions this work is needed. Given this weather recovery will be fast.