A New Season

A New Season Begins

The past few weeks have been extremely busy for the course team in preparation for the start of the main golfing season. A persistent and frigid north-easterly wind has been causing some concern but hopefully now the worst has passed and temperatures will begin to rise. Most of our work has revolved around the Captains Drive In which was held on Saturday and making sure that the course is looking its best in these challenging conditions. We moved swiftly on from that competition straight into maintenance week which is now in full flow.

New Machinery

Last week the club took delivery of a pedestrian aerator which we believe will make huge improvements to our ability to maintain quality, healthy surfaces. The Toro Procore is the leading machine on the market and is already showing its quality in its first week on the job. After brief training due to user friendliness and maneuverability the Procore has been used this week to aerate the greens and surrounds in minimal time and with minimal disturbance. The machine is so fast that we have even been able to utilise it on other areas whilst waiting for other machinery to finish.

The team being trained on the Procore

We hope that this increase in speed and lack of disturbance will allow us to perform these operations more frequently with less interruption to play whilst continuing to improve playing surfaces.

Maintenance week

This years spring maintenance follows a similar plan to last year with the added bonus of the new machinery to our fleet. Following on from an application of lawn sand last week to control moss we began by scarifying the greens and surrounds in two directions to remove the dead moss and thatch buildup.

Scarifying 15th green

The organic material that has been removed

The surface showing scarifyer grooves

Once the greens had been scarified we followed with the Procore to aerate to a depth of around 3 inches. The greens were then ironed to avoid any compaction from the topdresser. The greens have been topdressed with straight sand which is brushed into the scarified grooves, aeration holes and fills any other imperfections in the surface and dilutes any thatch present.

Procore being used on the 13th green

Aerated surface ready for top dressing

10th green after top dressing

Now that the easterly winds have died down we hope that the soil temperatures will rise and spring growth will begin. Then we can resume our summer cutting regime and begin preparations for this years tournaments.

New Bunkers

The members will have noticed that the new bunkers on the 16th and 18th fairways are now open and ready for play. The addition of clean sand has given a good finish and we are very happy with all the  winter projects.

Clean sand added

The finished product

Ecology

Whilst we have finished with our big ecology projects of the winter we are still continuing work on this front. Some of the greenkeepers are involved in beginning to survey the species of birds present on the course which will be beneficial in tailoring our bird boxes. Raith Miller in particular is working hard on creating different types of boxes so that we can maximise the species present. Hopefully this along with the new sandy waste areas which can benefit species such as mining bees will allow the ecology of the course to flourish this summer.