February course news

The 8^th tee alterations and the new hollow behind the 7^th green have been turfed and good progress has been made on the 1^st tee.  With favourable weather the 1^st tee should be ready for turfing in a couple of weeks.  Some changes have been made to the fairway irrigation on the 2^nd and 14^th fairways.  In both cases the line of the fairway has been altered and the pipes and sprinklers needed to be moved to match.  Work has started on installing irrigation in the area between the clubhouse and the 1^st tee.  This is an area of high wear and without irrigation, we’ve struggled to keep good grass cover.  Although the very cold, frosty period in January slowed progress on the construction projects, we were able to make good progress on gorse coppicing.  We also did a bit of work cutting back encroaching gorse and breaking up large stands of gorse, particularly where bramble was taking over.  There has also been good progress on woodland management where a substantial block has been thinned. 

February work programme

We’re a little behind with our aeration programme due to the hard frosts we’ve recently experienced, so we’ll be intensifying both deep and shallow solid tine aeration.  Deep aeration of the fairways will start and we hope to do shallow tining of the greens during the next week, with deeper aeration later in the month.  We aim to have the 1^st tee levelled and turfed by the end of February and the re-turfing of the damaged area on the 18^th green will be done over the next couple of weeks.  We may dig out one or two of the stony bunkers and put in a base layer of clean soil, to prevent stone coming to the surface.