Ready to go again

Maintenance week 1 is complete, now we gear ourselves up to start all over again on holes 10-18. These holes will be closed from Monday this week up until Friday morning. In this time we will carry out the same procedure as on all the other greens we have done so far, 12mm solid tine, 6mm hollow tine, topdress and roll. The greens on 1-9 will be beginning to settle down now, we have rolled them over the weekend to help smooth the surfaces, we will try to cut them as normal from Monday, depending on sand on the surface. On Wednesday they will be sprayed with fertiliser and biostimulants to promote healthy recovery.

On Thursday and Friday we continued solid tining walkways and some wetter areas on the fairways on holes 1-9. This took its toll on the solid tines as some areas of the course on holes 1-9 have stones very shallow below the surface, these areas are unknown when tining and all it takes is to hit one and bang, the tines end up like the ones below. All told around 12 tines were damaged beyond repair from doing walkways on holes 1-9, fortunately the chances of stone damage on holes 10-18 is a lot less as the subsurface is deeper and turns to clay opposed to stone. We will also try to complete 10-18 bunker edging this week.

I have previously mentioned worm cast issues we face and the lack of chemicals available to control them. A recent video I saw online of worms being extracted by the use of mustard made me want to experiment a little to see if was of any use to reduce damage to our turf. I selected 4 areas where i know cast are a real issue. 3 of them around the practice green and the last one around the edge of the front putting green. The area around the practice green was sprayed with a mixture of ground mustard powder and water, at a rate of 50gms per 5 litres water. One area spayed once, one sprayed twice and the third sprayed 3 times, so in theory doubling and tripling the amount of product applied to each area. The areas were 6m x 6m each and clearly marked to identify whether the mustard has had any effect of casts. The forth area was treated with the same amount of product per 5 liters of water, however this time was applied using a watering can to ensure the soil was soaked sufficiently. The sites will be checked this week and any changes to casts will be recorded and I will publish my results on my next blog.