The mornings are drawing in on the team’s morning start time with darkness persisting well past our regular 6am greenkeeper’s roll call, a shift to a later start time will be upon us shortly.
Rainfall is getting back to average with August seeing roughly 60mm and September looking at being slightly drier than average with just over 30mm having fallen as I write this, good conditions for soil management.
Recovery from anthracnose has been consistent and another sunny week will bring benefit as we continue with light feeding and topdressing. In addition to anthracnose we have seen the occurrence of a disease that we have been fortunate not to have to deal with in the past, the round patches of disease that are apparent are caused by a disease called take-all patch. As with anthracnose the occurrence of this is a knock-on from the summer heat.
It is most successful in affecting fine turf, particularly bentgrass, when wet winters and springs are followed by hot summers, a text book situation given the year that we have had. Further affecting the impact is the reduced fertility programme that we follow that give our bentgrass populations an advantage over our Poa annua populations. Recovery from take-all patch is best managed by maintaining little and often fertility inputs with particular attention given to pH of the products used and by altering trace element inputs.
Given the traffic and heavy use they receive, a deep aerate and heavy topdress have been applied to our tees over the last fortnight. A further round of aeration and topdressing will be undertaken in the next month to finish off the season and prep for the winter.
Work will shortly begin on expanding the 8th tee to give us a substantially larger teeing surface. The areas for white, yellow and purple tees will be expanded to the right and a path will be installed to manage traffic from the 7th green.
As per our usual winter work schedule we will be renovating a number of bunkers over the winter season. Once the schedule has been finalised those bunkers that will be renovated will be published.
We are seeing heavy traffic from animals through the bunkers this year, particularly from deer and hares, we do rake bunkers as often as we can to address this issue but please do help us in presenting your golf course by doing the right thing and raking your footprints if you are playing from bunkers.
