Greg’s Greenkeeping Blog August 2024

August has been the first dry month of 2024 and there’s no surprise this has resulted in great conditions for golf.

It certainly makes things more straightforward for the Greenkeeping team too, with growth slowing, maintenance has become slightly less demanding for the first time this season.

Because of this a few other areas of the course have had some attention and we’ve also been able to properly test out our irrigation upgrades, with automatic programs being used regularly in August.

Winter Program

I had promised to release plans for the off season, in regards to potential course upgrades or changes. However, we’re having to wait on the resolution of a couple of larger issues before we can make any other financial commitments. 

With this in mind, I was asked if I would be able to do a Q & A in this format and having collated a number of questions since, I’m happy to be able to accommodate this request.

Q&A

With membership fees being increased this year, it would have been nice to see more improvements made. Why hasn’t this been the case?

We took the difficult decision to increase fees to cope with ever spiraling costs. Particularly wages and energy prices, but pretty much everything has been increasing exponentially since the pandemic. 

We reached a point where we couldn’t make any more cuts to the facilities or our resources, leaving us with raising prices the only real option. We pride ourselves on providing excellent facilities at very low cost and even with putting prices up we still offer great value.

In addition, we have always invested in ongoing improvements to our facilities and the price increase will allow us to continue to do so.

A further positive is that we have been able to retain current staffing and the long term sustainability of the business is looking more and more positive.

The course has been dry and firm recently, making it harder to stop a ball. Why isn’t the irrigation system used?

There’s two answers to this question.

1. The irrigation system is used regularly during dry periods, mostly at night, when cycles can be run without impacting on golf. Watering is still carried out by members of our team as well, with old sections of the system still having to be operated manually. In fact in August over 125,000 liters of water has been applied to the course!
2. It’s important to understand that the biggest influence on playing conditions comes from the weather. Hunley has firm, running conditions due to its very nature. Irrigation is only applied to maintain the health of the turf, but isn’t and cannot be applied to soften the greens for ‘target’ golf. 

Why aren’t the fairways watered?

We have begun installing a new system but this only incorporates Greens, Tees & Approaches. The cost of the new system is already a huge commitment and adding fairways was just a step too far.

More of a problem though than just cost, would be the amount of water required to irrigate large areas. We simply don’t have the water source capable of facilitating fairway irrigation.

With that being said, our fairways cope well through dry periods so even if we could, the requirement for irrigation on fairways is minimal anyway.

I’m losing too many balls on the course, can’t something be done to widen the holes more?

In this instance, we need to know the specific areas of the course where a ball is lost. Then we can assess if we need to take action or not and what any action may involve.

It’s worth pointing out too, that we actually have some of the widest fairways in the country. We also then have semi rough mown by the fairways and around greens making them wider still. 

Next to that is a second cut of managed rough, where grass is cut and collected with a special machine to aid ball retrieval. Holes playing across the slope have extra wide areas of managed rough to allow for balls running down the hill ie Jaws.

On a weekly basis we mow over one hundred acres of land, which is a larger area than the entirety of most 18 hole courses. The second cut of managed rough makes up a further 40 acres meaning ‘playing areas’ are really very generous.

Obviously we can’t eliminate the possibility of lost balls, but we do feel the course is very fair. However with the wet weather, it has been the case this year that some in play areas have thickened up, leading to us getting behind on maintenance. 

This is where many members get in touch to help us identify potential problem patches. When feedback is more specific like this, it is very useful to us and helps us to prioritise our work.

Why don’t you allow fairways and semi rough to grow longer so a ball doesn’t run off?

Height of cut on these areas has to be within a certain range to reward good shots. We are already on the higher side of the range and therefore we have little leeway.

It’s important to understand that if we let them get too long, grass gets trapped between the club and ball, which prevents any spin being generated by what would otherwise be a clean contact. 

Semi rough is at a height where it will hold up a rolling ball from a good but less than perfect shot and on sloping fairways more semi rough is cut to allow for this, as well as more second cut. 

It would be nice to see some ball washers, more flower beds around the building and more plush course furniture. Can this not be implemented?

Whilst we’d love to add a greater element of luxury to the facilities, we have to be realistic. Resources are focused on offering great facilities, on a consistent basis but we also have to be responsible with our decisions.

Every year we do make many improvements though and this will continue to be the case.

Pin placements can be difficult at times. There are often pins that you just can’t get close to when playing an approach, why is this?

There’s a few aspects to this. 

Firstly we have small greens at Hunley, which means we have less available positions to choose from. We have to move them around the green to prevent turf from wearing out and this means sometimes locating a hole nearer the edge of the green.

However, when we do this we ensure that there is a good mix of ‘easy’, ‘moderate’ and ‘difficult’ pin locations each week and we do ensure the ‘difficult’ ones are always less than a handful on all 27 holes.

The team also uses a ‘Clinometer’ which is used to ensure no hole is placed on a slope of more than 2.5 degrees. This means it is always possible for a chip or putt to come to rest by the hole.

Much like with the dry and firm nature of the course, it is impossible for us to set things up to suit each individual’s game. We do what we can to provide a fair test and then it’s up to the player to negotiate the course as they find it!

Why are there weeds on the perimeter of some holes, such as Thistle and Cow Parsley? These are in some cases even quite close to teeing areas?

In many cases these are not weeds, but are plants offering value to the course which is perhaps not always obvious. 

Where these plants are on the course but well out of play, we leave them alone as they offer great benefit to a variety of species of wildlife. Thistle for example offers a source of food to Goldfinch and the Pink Lady Butterfly uses them to lays its eggs ready for the caterpillars to feed. These all add value to the site and are in no way causing harm, so removing these would be time consuming and unnecessary.

It is accepted though that when these types of plants get closer to play, they are less pleasing on the eye than other plants. As such we try to minimise their impact and we are aware of the few tee boxes where they populate. In August some of these were cut back for this reason and in time we will try to get more on top of these areas.

Overall it’s a balance we have to strike and unfortunately we can’t solve every issue out there.

Divots on Tees & fairways are getting quite bad. Why aren’t they kept repaired more frequently?

We repair divots on tees as often as possible, but it is fair to say we have not been able to keep up with the level of play on the course this season. Having a member of staff down this summer has contributed to this but even with a full compliment it’s hard to keep up.

Fairways aren’t so bad, but it would be nice to carry out a divot repair from time to time. We have discussed the idea of forming a group of Artisans to help and this would certainly be a way of solving such problems.

The teeing area on Walkers Gully was very wet for a long period this year. All the tees on this hole are very small too. Are there any plans for improving these like others have been in recent years?

It is certainly something on our radar. Although we have yet to make any firm plans for improvements this winter, this is an area we will consider.

Bunkers sometimes seem low on sand, are they not topped up?

Again this is an area where I’d say we have not always got things right this year. Obviously most of that has been out of our hands with so much heavy rain causing washouts and lots of extra hours work repairing them afterwards.

The recent dry spell following the wet has caused some of them to go crusty and even hard underneath. To fix this we have begun breaking up the sand with shovels and redistributing it around the bunker base.

It has also been the case that some have become low on sand and need to be topped up. This is on the agenda for early September.

September

I hope the above Q&A was of interest and thanks to those that offered questions. I think one thing I’ve come to realise from talking to people, is that often when you see something on the course that you feel isn’t right, it’s highly likely that we agree with you. It’s just that we haven’t had chance to get round to dealing with it!

So I suppose from that the best thing I can suggest is to talk to us and we can either explain or give you a timescale for any work planned.

Hopefully September will give us a prolonged summer and our aim is certainly to maintain the same high standards well into autumn.

Having mentioned briefly above about creating a group of Artisans, if anybody would like to put themselves forward to offer some organised assistance then please do get in touch. Likewise if you have any questions or suggestions equally feel free to reach out.

Many thanks for reading and for your continued support.

Greg Fitzmaurice

Course Manager

[email protected]