After a long bout of cold weather where Spring never really got going, we have finally said goodbye to the frosty mornings and hello to some soil temperature! This means that our greens are now really starting to flush out with growth and the disease scars from last Autumn’s attack of anthracnose and fusarium can finally start to fill in and disappear.

The flush of growth is about three weeks later than what we would normally expect but we can now concentrate on getting the greens back to their best.

So how will we do that?

We have been hard at work putting a plan together to eradicate future disease and drastically increase the health of the turf on our greens, this plan includes:

Quadrop

The new Quadrop irrigation dosing system now treats our irrigation water to give it extra the nutrients and balance the pH, something which important when watering the greens with “mains” drinking water.

More, more, more aeration!

We have recently bought a slitter for our greens, and a spiked roller so that every week we can get air into the surface, and we are having a demonstration of a topdresser in a fortnight’s time with a plan to purchase so that we can give our greens a very light dusting of sand every 2-3 weeks through the summer to keep filtering out the thatch in the surface and keep the greens smooth and fast.

Tonics and Biostimulants

Since our greens soil was tested in a lab last September, we are now able to apply a range of extra biostimulants, liquid aerators and additives to combine with the extra aeration and optimise the rootzone for healthy greens turf. This will help us to balance the levels of iron, calcium, magnesium, and reduce CO2 in the soil.

Overseeding

Once we get to the end of the summer we aim to hire a Greens Overseeding Machine so that we can encourage better grasses that have wilted in the past due to the poor soil conditions. We will be overseeding with a very specific bent/fescue mix of fine grasses designed for close mowing, and we aim to do this every year to slowly get rid of the weaker grasses on the greens.

Benefits to the golfer

The benefits to the golfer from all of this work will be faster, firmer, truer and more consistent greens throughout the year. With healthier growth going into Winter especially, the greens will be stand up to wear much better in the cold season and therefore have a head start into the Spring. This means that we can speed them up quicker in April and May every year going forward.