The weather has certainly been fortunate for us to enable a surge in healthy grass growth over the past few weeks. This extra growth combined with our rough mower unfortunately having to be repaired over the last few weeks has resulted in a lot of lost balls, so apologies about that!
The rough mower came back to us on Tuesday and is cutting a lot cleaner than before. As a result, sadly there will be grass clippings around the rough, however, this will soon burn off as days go by.
The watering system also produced two leaks over the past week, one by the 6th green and one by on the 8th in the rough at bottom of fairway. These have proved difficult to locate due to the water showing above ground being nowhere near the actual leak, so we have had to dig a lot of holes to try to expose it. Also due to the location of the leak being at the bottom of the slope, all remaining water in the pipes must flow out of the pipe before a repair can take place and it is a lot of water!
This week the greens have been double verti cut and had fertiliser applied, the grass is now outgrowing the damage caused by leatherjackets and will fill in from here forward. Now that the grass coverage has improved, we will be lowering the heights of the greens from 4mm to just over 3mm early next week.
We have started edging and tidying up the bunkers this week, and this will continue over the next week or two to make sure that they are well presented.
The area between the 5th & 6th has now had the ropes removed and has been mowed down to rough length, this is a huge improvement and the areas that are not playable are marked by white lines and these are No Play Zones (Free drop).
We are experimenting with areas of long grass on the course to encourage wildlife and wildflowers etc. One of the reasons being that the more small birds that we can encourage the better, as when they dig to eat leather jackets due to their small beaks they cause little to no damage on the greens. These long grass areas should in theory be out of play around the course! If everyone could avoid driving buggies through these areas that would be appreciated.
Vince Vosper
Head Greenkeeper