March a busy month

Well March is over and it brought with it some well needed dry weather. 

This has allowed us to get back out on the golf course and finish some if the outstanding jobs from the wet winter months. 

These have included lifting the tree lines around some of tees to allow more light and air on the surfaces plus improve line of sight from the back tees.

The 5th tee 

The 8th tee 

Lifting trees lines behind greens at the 4th

The left of the 15th hole was lifted as the encroachment over the last few years has started to effect the second shot into the green. 

The silver birch in front if the 10th tee was removed to allow us to use the entire tee and it just the right hand side.

Ladies 3rd tee 

We also renovated the ladies tee at the 3rd. This has been extremely damaged as this tee was used by all golfers during the wet winter months while the men's tee was growing in following it's rebuild. 

The tee was striped and the worn turf was used in our compost area and other worn areas.

Once cleared rootzone was added 

Then it was levelled and firmed in

A little bit of fertiliser was added to speed up the root development and enhance the turf. 

The tee was then re turfed and will be open as soon as it's ready. 

The new nets 

The new nets were opened this month and if you look at the before and after photos this is a huge improvement. Our thanks must go to all the sponsors. Without whom the new nets would not have been built. John Brazier, Jim Milligan, Terry Ray, Danny Rowlands all gave up their time to help get this project over the line. My thanks also go to Steve White for the build and to the greenstaff who helped out when required. 

The banks of the nets were turfed 

And then the laurel hedge was planted 

Other work 

It's also been fantastic to get the course cut lately even if the weather has tried other ways to stop us :-)

 

The fairways, surrounds and aprons were all given a spring tonic of iron and liquid fertiliser. This will help to reduce the moss in the fairways and give them a little kick to start the road to recovery. 

The greens were aerated to 5 inches using pencil tines. This allows some air down into the roots to aid recovery, improve soil structure and improve infiltration rates. This will need doing a bit more this season mainly because the heavy rain that fell this winter and high water table have left the soils compact (as it's squeezed out the air between the soil particles). 

The other downside of the wet weather is that it tends to flush out nutrients that are held in the soils. We gathered our soil samples and sent them off for analysis. This informs us of what nutrients are available and what is required in the coming year. 

The greens were fertilised with 5.0.0 lawn sand. You may have noticed that the greens went very dark after this was applied? This is another great benefit of this product. It's a little bit old school but the dark greens attract the heat and this in turn helps to raise the soil tempratures to encourage growth during the beginning of the season. 

The bunkers also reviewed there first edge of the year. The new bunkers on the course have also been topped up and the rest will be renovated in the coming weeks. This will inude de stoning, weeding, edging again and topping up. 

That's all for now but I will update some more in the coming days.

Enjoy the sun

Matt