Now that we are moving into the colder season grass growth on the golf course has started to reduce signifcantly, giving our greenkeeping team a chance to turn their focus to some other projects and tasks on the course in preparation for the 2022 golf season.

The first of the projects is to bring our automatic irrigation to the competition tees on holes 6 and 10, as these new tees don’t have any form of irrigation at the moment.

This project involves removing the turf and digging a trench with our “Ditch Witch” machine to create a nice, neat line where we can lay our irrigation pipe, all the way from the control box near the back of the 6th tee.

From there we put in the pipe and install two swing joints and two spinklers either side of the tees. Once fitted we can pressure up the system and test it for any leaks before backfilling the trench, relaying the turf on top and tidying the area up.

Now is an ideal time to do this type of job as the ground is soft and easy to work with, but also because in a week’s time we will be completely depressurising the system for winter, so it’s good to still have water in the system to test for leaks.

Next on the agenda is the starting of trimming bushes around the course, which we have begun this week.

Some of the Dogwood bushes on the course have gotten a little too big and impacted on golfers when playing holes such as 6, 7 and 8. Our aim is to trim these right back to a manageable size and keep them maintained while we phase in a plan to replace many of them with young trees over the next few years.

We have also taken delivery of 30 tonnes of bunker sand so will shortly be renovating some of the worst bunkers including the big bunker at the front of the 10th green and the bunker in front of hole 17, and topping up many others.

We also have plenty of other plans to improve the golf course this winter so stay tuned for more information and updates!