Greens

The greens are the first area I addressed when taking over in my new role. The cut height of the greens is now down considerably from the summer months and I feel this has helped their playability.

Another area of concern was the patchiness and unevenness as a result of losing some coverage during the summer months, some of which was dry patch and dollar spot, especially on the 16th green. Dollar spot is a fungal turf disease that occurs during high humidity, warm days and cool nights. The affected patches are the size of a dollar, hence the name. Moisture from dew, light rain or irrigation and lack of air movement can encourage development of the disease.

We had another dollar spot break out following this but we managed to deal with it swiftly with no lasting damage/scaring through a chemical application.

As mentioned the greens are recovering nicely and should be back up to a fair standard in the coming weeks. We originally planned to deep scarify the greens to remove the spongy thatch layer that holds water. This will be revisited in the spring.

On the subject of recovery I feel we achieved fine results getting the 2nd green back to decent standard in a timely manner, following a spate of vandalism. Although demoralising, our efforts are paying off and demonstrate that it doesn’t have to take months to get the greens back after what is mindless vandalism.

As a compromise we double verticut the greens, followed by a deep verticut just before we solid tined the greens with 12mm tines and followed that with 20 tonnes of topdressing. We went for a more organic rich dressing rather than straight sand which is best suited to sand based greens. We overseeded the greens with a mix of fine bent and rye grasses which should aid playability, drought and disease tolerance.

I have changed our nutrition for the greens which should also help with disease tolerance and stop them drying so severely come next summer. I have implemented a disease management programme to try and lower our reliance on expensive fungicides, which will potentially enable us to utilise budget in other areas on the golf course. The first treatment for disease management has gone out as well as a new product to try and combat the bird pecking especially on 16 and 18.

Plans moving forward to further improve the greens will include a herbicide application to rid the greens of the weeds that have become quite invasive. This will be done in the spring followed by another overseed. The more fine grasses we get in, the better the greens will be.

Growth regulator and wetting agent will be part of our programme next spring, which again should help with the general health of the greens year round. We will also revisit the 6th green where the work carried out to make the putting surface larger struggled and failed to establish.