The joy's of Autumn

During the year many challenges are presented on the golf course that we must overcome in order to improve the playing surfaces at Muswell Hill. Difficult weather, high disease pressure but to name two but by far the most frustrating is the annual leaf clearing that we under take each autumn.
Being a parkland course we have a large number of trees around the course, and this adds to the attraction of playing golf at Muswell Hill but come the autumn this large number of trees means large numbers of leaves. Estimating how many leaves we have on the course is a hot topic of discussion in the Greenkeepers shed at the moment. Estimations of between 300,000 to 1.5 million have been raised. I've discovered there is a concept called the Leaf Area Index(LAI) that has based mathematical formula and crown size of trees to work out how many leaves are on trees.
I think I'll just go with there's a lot....

So how do we tackle the problem of trying to clear the playing surfaces of leaves.
On the greens & tees we use backpack blowers and blow the leaves off the playing surfaces. In terms of man hours this takes 6 hours a day. Obviously just blowing leaves around the golf course isn't  a very efficient way of making sure the surfaces stay clear as the wind has a tendency to blow them right back. So we also use a tractor operated vacuum/sweeper machine, the Trilo, which collects the leaves. These are then deposited at our compost site to be incorporated into future top dressing's for the surfaces. To clear areas we have a two different blowers that we use.
The strategy is to blow out areas and collect them with the Trilo. During this time of year 2/3 Greenkeepers a day are on this duty, equating to 21 + hours a day. Then there's also the ditches that need to be cleared.
The recent weather has been fairly dry so idle for picking the leaves up but it had also been very windy that isnt particular helpful when trying to blow leaves into position.
So next time your out on the course and an area is covered in leaves, just take a minute to see how many trees are around and try and equate that into how many leaves that could be. The leaf clearing team will be out somewhere on the course, continuing to hoover up and trying to clear the surfaces and also casting frustrating glances upwards as the wind disperses the pile we've just spent ages getting ready to clear.       
The joys of Autumn......