Killermont Course update!!!
It’s been a good week on the course with the exception of “Jack frost” limiting our course set ups ahead of play Mon,Tue,Wed mornings… it’s not ideal when we are looking for the recovery growth we would expect by now.
However we did maximise our course set up preparation in what little time frames we had before 1st tee time with each frost delay.
The Big progressive feature for us this week was getting our base granular fertiliser applications down ahead of the rain Thursday into Friday, these applications are key to bringing the turf quality up to our standards as they bring up the nutritional values in the soil for the plant and different grass species to level out any etiolated growths, ultimately bringing the turf quality on to the next level!!!
Over the course of Monday and Tuesday we had all of our surfaces cut except semi-rough.
Mon-Tues mowing….
Greens
approaches
surrounds
flymow all bunker and tee banks
Various strimming
aprons
fairways.
Knowing we had the visitors shotgun start on Wednesday morning and a possible frost delay…
Ryan took it upon himself to come in Tuesday evening to change the holes which freed a man up to push the set up Wednesday morning , that was a massive help.
Wednesday morning we arrived at 5.00 in the hope the frost didn’t come, we had planned to cut all surfaces including fairways but a white frost meant we couldn’t get at the greens so we switched on the irrigation for a couple of minutes just to speed up the thaw which enabled us to start mowing at 7.30 That made all made all the difference!
We did manage to walk round and fully rake the bunkers in the frost, Craig set up 5 hand mowers ready for the guys to go out and cut all greens in that 2hr gap.
we also managed to roll the greens & cut approaches, although it was tight in the end with golf teeing up as we were on our last green out at the 14th, we wouldn’t have managed that if not for running irrigation!!!
The guys had a well earned rest then did some maintenance at the sheds and set up for fertiliser applications ahead of the rain forecast Thursday into Friday, we also managed to get out and clear almost all of the grass bins, that was long overdue. (Just one or 2 more to go on the back end)
As soon as the visiting party came off the course we got straight out with 2 spreaders applying the base granular fert to both greens and tees.
It was a long day for us starting at 5.00am to 18.30, but happy to get these applications down ahead of the rain.
Thursday morning was another big push in at 6.00 am and out cutting fairways and surrounds and semi-rough, followed up with applying granular fertiliser to the surrounds of greens and bunkers, all walk offs and historically weak areas newly seeded last year.
We look for around 5mm rain minimum rainfall to wash our fertiliser applications in and by the end of Friday we had just over 8mm in the beaker and had run 2x irrigation applications on greens and surrounds one in the morning and one at night. That should be perfect with more rain forecast over the weekend.
It may have been noticed we didn’t cut the greens Thursday or Friday just to let the rain wash in the application, greens would have been much slower for that reason, but looking to double cut and roll tomorrow if required to get the speeds back up.
The first application of sand in the new bunkers at 11 and 14 had, as expected sunk down a tad but we managed to install around 1.5 tonne to each bunker which should stabilise fairly soon, as it is the old sand that came out old bunkers, which should firm up fairly quick.
We previously noted back in January that the 15th green had suffered form deep soil compaction resulting in poor drainage.
This has had an impact on turf quality on the edges of the green.
This will now be our next priority green for primary drainage installation next winter, in the mean time we have brought the green in just to let it recover as we have applied seed and nutrition, so we don’t want to be running the mowers over new seedlings etc.. it’s encouraging to see that the seed has already started to germinate this week and with some rain and fertiliser we will fully recover the green and cut it back out ASAP.
We are looking forward to course preparation for the spring meetings Saturday medal,
Greens cut
greens rolled
Holes changed
full bunker rake
Tee set up
Best of luck to all competing in tomorrow’s Spring meeting.
🌱⛳️😎
