Thundery end to July!

Another very busy period on the golf course. The high temperatures and low rainfall has been met with thunder storms and down pours. The much needed rain has helped the areas without irrigation to recover well. 

Interestingly the rain that fell during the thunder storms contained about 0.6kg of Nitrogen per hectare ( this is normal with thunder), with the rain falling at a pH of between 6.3 and 6.5, this then created a slight growth flush. It some ways this was welcome as it helped areas to recover but some of you would have noticed as the growth on greens from morning to evening was noticeable. We then re-applied our growth regulators to greens, tees, aprons and surrounds. This should help us maintain better growth rates over the coming weeks.

The greenstaff have worked tirelessly over the last month with over 60 hours of extra work each being carried out in July. 

I have so much to talk about this blog but I will try to keep it brief :-)

Some of you may have noticed the odd looking shoots of grass in certain areas of the course. This is the Perennial Ryegrass or Lolium Perenne as its also known. This grass species has spikelets (see photo above) from May to November that can grow between 4-40 cm. Each spikelet can produce upto 14 seeds. This is a short lived problem, we have spent many hours cutting these with strimmers to heights that we can then mow. (These tend to be hard to mow especially with cylinder mowers as the rollers on the front of the units make the shoots lay down so they are not cut and then the rear roller moves off the shoot and it springs back up again!)

Other works have included- flailing down the long roughs or brambles in amongst the trees to help the players find there ball. We thank Oliver's for our demo machine.

Clearing these areas also allows us to re claim some of the land the woodlands have/are slowy taking by encroaching year after year.

The new bins have been concreted out on the golf course. These will hopefully keep the course a bit tidier during high winds as these don't have have holes in the bottom:-) 

The new academy markers were painted and put out the course. The academy tees have now been fertilised but our hands are in the luck of the gods regarding water as these are not fitted with irrigation yet. We will be working on these over the winter to raise the standards for next year.

We have also been busy cutting up broken branches and lifting the tree canopy's. Some of you may have noticed that some of the limbs have got lower under the weight of the leafs this year.

We have spent time lifting the branches away from the pathways to keep them clear for golfers.

All these jobs plus our normal daily cutting, machinery set ups and those dreaded bunkers, have kept us busy over the last few weeks. 

I will blog again soon as there is to much to put into one blog. I will spend a bit of time talking about the bunkers in the next blog. 

I ve been told the weather will be good again so 'enjoy your golf' in the next round of sunshine :-)

Matt