Course prep

Over the last couple of weeks the team have been incredibly busy preparing the course for a big week of competitions. The course is always presented to the best of our ability for year round golf, however with the scratch cup and the Yorkshire seniors championship here we stepped up the presentation to make it look and play its best over those few days.

All the course has been cut regularly to ensure all areas are looking there best, this meant double cutting greens, tees, surrounds, increasing frequency of fairway and semi rough cutting and blowing any areas off to stop grass accumulation from machinery.

The greens were also rolled a number of times to help build up speed and trueness.

The team should be really proud of how the course did and currently looks. The feedback from the past few weeks has been incredible, the only downside, if there is one is that we can not keep that pace and cover that workload for the rest of the playing season.

On top of getting the course ready for the competitions we have also tidied up the banks on the 23rd hole. The 23rd tee is really poor and the mole activity on the side of the tee is the main reason for subsidence on the tee surface. Cutting the grass down helps catch the moles that are doing the damage. The tee does need relevelling and turfing, this is one of our priority jobs but currently not top of the list for this winter.

Shortly the greens will be spiked to reduce surface compaction and allow water and air into the profile, with rolling the greens they will have built up a little surface compaction, this slows water penetration and can lead to surface water with very little rain as was the case on Monday morning.

The entrance lane has now been strimmed to allow better view of traffic and we have tidied around the newly planted hedgerow on the 20th hole.


After the recent playing schedule we have an opportunity to topdress greens, so this will be done over the next week or so.



We have started spraying weeds in the semi rough to begin with, the fairways and other parts of the course are a little dry at the moment and there is risk of scorching the grass. The semi is being blanket sprayed (spraying it all) to reduce weeds and increase turf quality. Should the weather change the fairways and tees will also be sprayed

Bunker sand

It been cut, cut, cut since my last blog, although the weather hasn't been all that warm its been warm enough to continue the growth. The moisture has retained in the soil on the shadier sections of the course, moisture equals growth. The long rough and the intermediate rough has seen the most growth has has thickened up substantially in the ast couple of weeks. This week we are cutting all intermediate rough and getting all the other areas cut between trees. We have strimmed around all trees in the cut rough to tidy bases up.

Other bits we aim to strim over the next week are the entrance lane sides and bits left on tee banks.

Its been a hot weekend and start to this week so the irrigation system is being used every night to water greens. We are also having to hand water dry bits on greens such as bunker backs and ridges on some of the more undulating greens. The 3 greens that are not connected to the system are being hand watered during the day and they visually look drier than the others even they are getting some water. the issue we are facing is that watering them during the day leads to a lot of initial evapouration, meaning less water is retained in the soil to be taken up by the roots. When the greens are watered through the night a lot less evapouration occurs and the water can penetrate deeper in to the soil profile and more can be taken up by the plants. This hot spell is not set to last so the irrigation will get a rest. It looks like next week could be more unsettled.

We have had 60 tonne of bunker sand delivered and is being spread into all green side bunkers initially, should we need more for the fairway bunkers this will be ordered for the coming weeks