The
mild march weather gave us some good grass growth to work with and most of the
playing surfaces are quite advanced for the time of year. Grass growth is about two weeks ahead of last
year, a month ahead of 2015, about the same as 2014 and six weeks ahead of
2013. The new tees on the 1st,
6th and 8th holes are growing in well and could be in
play in a few weeks if the weather stays mild.
During March we top dressed the greens twice and the green surrounds
once. We’ve been topping up bunkers with
sand and cutting fairway bunker banks and removing the cuttings. As with rough cutting, removing the cuttings
takes away nutrients and helps us to develop wispy rough. Lots of brambles have been cut back around
the course and this work will continue over the next few weeks. Our programme of work to improve the green
surrounds will continue over the next few weeks and throughout the season. The first phase of this work was the
application of a weed-killer that selectively kills ryegrass and other coarse
grasses last Autumn. In areas that had
the highest percentage of coarse grass, particularly if they were areas prone
to drought stress and wear, the gaps created by the loss of coarse grass will
take a while to recover. We’ve made some
changes to the maintenance regime for the surrounds and approaches this year with
the intention of improving turf quality.
We’re using a hand mower for the first cut around the greens and an old
greens triple for mowing the surrounds and approaches, this will give us a
better quality of cut and reduced wear. Some
more sprinklers have been fitted so that we can irrigate some of the weak areas
of green surround and we intend to do more hand watering where the pop up
sprinklers will not reach. Weak areas
will be over-seeded with a fine but hard wearing seed mix and more aeration and
top dressing work will be done.
April
work programme
Hopefully
the warm spring weather will continue to provide good growing conditions but
this is by no means guaranteed. The
average temperature for this March was higher than the April average for four
of the last five years. The frequency of
mowing will increase for all areas as growth rates increase and the height of
cut on the greens will be reduced from the winter height of 6mm to the summer
height of 5mm.
The
next top dressing of the greens will be after the ladies’ spring meeting. Work on topping up bunker sand and cutting
back brambles will continue and it’s likely that we will need to apply
selective weed-killer to the fairways as clover appears over the next few
weeks.
Twitter
A
Twitter account has been started so that we can keep members up to date with
course activity and anything of interest.
The user name is Greens_AGC.
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