Let’s be trustworthy, we flip up and anticipate excellence. Each membership golfer needs the greens to be nearly as good as they are often and, typically, we’re not shy in expressing our views if we understand them to be completely different.
However how many people have stopped to suppose how these placing surfaces have been produced? What goes into making ready them and retaining them in the absolute best situation? How are golf greens maintained?
For Your Course, produced by the British and Worldwide Golf Greenkeepers Affiliation, we spoke to 3 course managers from throughout the UK to know how they overcome widespread issues that come up on golf programs throughout winter.
This week, we’re asking about each day greens upkeep and the way greenkeepers go about setting the heights of their placing surfaces.
Tackling these questions are greenkeeping veteran Andrew Laing; Caroline Munro, head greenkeeper at Bonar Bridge and Ardgay; and Rob Sandilands, course supervisor at Formby Women.
Greens upkeep: What do you do each day to arrange your greens?
Andrew: It varies with the time of 12 months. Throughout the summer season, we’d be slicing just about day-after-day all through the rising season.
From April definitely till the tip of October, I’d anticipate to be mowing day-after-day – probably alternating with rolling if we have been in a interval of decrease development. Throughout the winter months, we’d take away the dew day-after-day utilizing quite a lot of instruments – whether or not that be a brush or cane, whip and pole, and that helps to scale back the danger of illness by retaining the surfaces drier.
On the again finish of yearly, each season, now we have a complete soil take a look at finished. That offers a spread of standards to take a look at – water infiltration charges, natural matter content material and accessible vitamins.
From that, we will devise a plan for the autumn as to what kind of aeration and renovation work we have to do and the way extreme that can must be. I all the time base the work we schedule on the outcomes of the soil take a look at.
Rob: Wintertime prep can be eradicating the dew, eradicating any wormcasts and any particles like that – we’ve obtained fairly a number of pine timber on web site.
Now we have a staff of four-and-a-half so, realistically, each day knowledge assortment will not be one thing that’s achievable for us however we’d do it periodically – as soon as each week or two – significantly in the summertime if we have been having occasions of dryness.
In that interval, we’re mowing day-after-day and we roll as soon as per week as nicely. We’re slicing grass close to sufficient year-round, in comparison with just some years in the past, and we’re doing a lot extra work heading in the right direction prep.
Caroline: I swap and reduce, mainly. That’s it. Once I reduce them, I exploit the clock so they’re on a unique angle day-after-day. The perimeter reduce is anticlockwise and clockwise. I’ve obtained a John Deere 2500B and people models are offset. It means while you’re slicing the perimeter, the tyre marks aren’t happening the identical route.
Each second day the tyres are on a unique route and so that you don’t get the tyre mark in your perimeter reduce. It’s about two hours of switching and slicing.
Greens upkeep: How do you set your peak of reduce and what does that imply in your course?
Caroline: They’re up at 5mm for the winter. We simply reduce as soon as per week after which slowly carry them down. I by no means go decrease than 4mm – simply because I feed mine granular and I solely lately obtained a sprayer that works.
I am going for grass protection and them not being fairly as fast however operating true. I can’t put the hours into sustaining a inexperienced that 3mm would require. I haven’t obtained the funds for the inputs that would want to enter sustaining that.
Andrew: The bottom I might go to in any given 12 months is 3.75mm and that’s throughout the summer season months. Via the winter, we come as much as 4.5mm and that’s to provide the plant somewhat bit of additional safety by these colder months when there’s much less development.
Some guys would possibly carry the peak of reduce as much as possibly 6mm throughout the winter however I prefer to maintain somewhat extra consistency. We don’t go excessively low in the summertime and we don’t go excessively excessive by the winter.
Rob: It varies relying on the time of 12 months and grass species. We’d be round 4.5mm in the summertime and 5-5.5mm within the winter.
That offers us a superb steadiness, with the quantity of advantageous grass we’ve obtained, to attain a smart velocity for each day play. If we wanted to lean on it with some rolling, we may nonetheless handle to get an affordable velocity for an exterior match.
This text seems in Your Course, the twice-yearly publication from the British and Worldwide Golf Greenkeepers Affiliation. Your Course invitations golfers to achieve a deeper appreciation of what making ready and sustaining a golf course actually entails. Head to www.bigga.org.uk to search out out extra.
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