Last week was a productive one with lots of mowing taking place.
As well as the usual areas such as fairways, tees, greens etc, we also spent a fair bit of time cutting and collecting the golfing rough again. We have now completed nearly all the holes on the Morgans course as well as a couple of holes under the bridge. The wet weather today has slowed progress, but I still feel that by the end of the week all of the golfing rough (rough immediately adjacent to the fairway) on the course will be cut back.
Following on after the cutting and collecting we have been treating the weeds (predominantly Clover). This is a much slower process and will be ongoing throughout the summer. Importantly though, having cut the golfing rough down, the Clover is not likely to hide a golf ball in the same way for a while, buying us the time to treat more areas as we go.
We will continue work on the golfing rough this week, both cutting and collecting and treating the weeds.
For a while, work has been required on the greens and we began given them some attention today, applying a granular fertiliser to all greens. This will give slowly released nutrition to the turf over the next 10-12 weeks, improving the overall health of the turf and in particular the density of the sward.
We will also be starting to pencil tine the greens to relieve some of the compaction that has built up. We haven’t been able to carry out aeration on the greens as often as we would have liked for various reasons, so we will look to catch up over the coming weeks.
Pencil tining with 8 mm diameter tines is ideal at this time of year as it breaks up the surface tension allowing water to percolate through the soil and allows roots to penetrate to a greater depth, without disrupting the playing surface. Once the green has been spiked, mowing afterwards makes it hard to see where the work has been carried out.
Finally, why not come along to the next course walk on Tuesday 13th June at 14:00 where we shall be looking at many of these issues as well as seeing some machinery in action!
Bye for now,
Greg