Topdressing

Last week the weather was a little more unpredictable, thundery showers for most of the week ruled out any chance of continuing spraying for weeds across the course. We did however get the opportunity on Monday to groom the greens. Just to remind anyone that isn't familiar with the process here's what we use to remove lateral growth from the surface of the greens

The vertical blades cut and lift the ends of the grass that is laid, this if left would cause grain and poor putting surfaces. However it can also be detrimental to over groom or scarify, this process if done too regularly will stress the grass plant leading to poor and thin surfaces, which can be prone to moss and weed infestation, along with higher disease pressures given the right conditions. It is a difficult balance to maintain surface quality and reduce grass stress. The groomers are on the greens cutting units on the old mower. We use this mower simply to groom greens as it often can pick up sand from the surface which blunts the cutting blades. Following on behind the grooming mower is another greens mower which tidies up any mess and long ends left from grooming. One measure to reduce stress to the plant, especially after grooming is to apply fertiliser which gives the plant the means of recovery, not just from the process but from general wear through machinery and foot traffic. Last week we applied an application of porthcawl ( a bio stimulant ) and urea (fertiliser) along with seaweed. This mix is applied every 2-3 weeks and watered in using the irrigation system. 

Unfortunately during the process of spraying the fertiliser on the greens the sprayer has broken down, to be more specific the pump bearings have deteriorated to the point where they need replacing. Unfortunately the sprayer is near 30 years old and this is not the only thing that is deteriorating on it, the chassis is rotten and the control system is also leaking under pressure. This November a sprayer MOT has been introduced to ensure sprayer and the quality of spray they deliver meets a standard. This is just like a car MOT, it ensures poor spraying is not leading to environmental issues that can be avoided. Unfortunately for us our sprayer in its current condition is no where near the level it needs to be at. The cost of repair is far greater than expected, the sprayer is not worth spending too much money on as it is very old. The decision has been made to replace the sprayer at a cost not much more than the repairs. Plus we are 100 % guaranteed that we have a sprayer that complies with all legislation.

This week we are spiking and topdressing greens again. The demo spiker has been a great tool to speed up aeration on the greens, in just over 3 hours all the greens (30) have been spiked. If we were doing that with our wiedenmann, it would have taken over 13hours. The spiker has tines of 8mm but only to a depth of 50mm, however the weidenmann has a wide range of tine widths and can go to depths of 300mm if needed. The spiker is simply designed to relieve surface compaction allowing water and air into the immediate surface area.

Speaking of aeration, this is your first reminder that the annual intense aeration programme on the greens will start 1st August. This will be on holes 1-9 and they will be closed from 6.00am Monday Morning to 6.00am Friday morning. The following week we will then repeat the process on holes 10-18
More details will follow on the schedule of work during the week.

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

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.