Course update!!!
It’s been a really challenging week for the team with continued low staffing levels and some guys on holiday, but the guys filling in stepped up brilliantly👏👏👏
There is now the added workload on the course which does take priority of hand water tees etc…. The course is really starting to dry out now and we are losing 2 men each morning to hand watering tees and various hot spots throughout the course, during these dry weeks hand watering takes priority and obviously that means something in our cutting routine has to give, this week it was the flymowing of bunkers and divot seeding fairways (both planned for next week).
We did so well to recover a large percentage of lost coverage last year from the heat wave of summer of 2021, we have been out on top of watering the usual dry spots very early this year trying to build up the moisture levels to be able to maintain coverage….
We are confident we will keep the greens, surrounds, tees and approaches, but we will almost certainly struggle to keep full coverage the fairways bunker surrounds, and the old fairway drainage which is already on the turn. We have something up our sleeve to combat the drainage but it will still use man power that we just don’t have at present, we will report back on that.
We have now raised the heights of cut on almost all surface’s. The fairways up to 17mm from 15mm, to help maintain coverage while dry. If we were blessed with fairway irrigation we would be down as low as 14mm or less, but without means of maintaining moisture the only measure of protection is the heights of cut.
We will be cutting half of the 17th fairway at 15mm just as an example of the stress this “desired” height of cut has in the prolonged dry conditions.
Tees and approaches have been raised 1mm to 12mm for the same reason.
Surrounds back up to 25mm from 23mm.
Greens,
We are in the peak season for poa annual meadow grass seeding, it is fairly wide spread so we have kept the greens lean and below our usual nutritional levels just to help maintain trueness and speeds which we have managed quite well, averaging (11.5 since) since the stewart cup with just a single cut at 3mm.
But we have since begun to bring the nutritional levels up with a spray mix application today. We should start to see the greens look a lot healthier but lose some natural speed, we will have other measures to try and and maintain our targets of (10.5-11)
For this reason we think it is important we update the greens speeds on club 1 each morning just to prepare golf of average speeds, as opposed to the shock on the 1st green, especially for medals and events.
We have put some extra work into the 18th green with light aeration and heavy sand dressings to the new drainage, just to try and level out some imperfections levels. We will be working the excess sand in over the next week or so, it will be good and clean before the captains prize and medal weekend.
Killermont Greens Team 🌱⛳️😎
