Course prep

We had the greenkeepers (Bigga) autumn outing yesterday. We had the course all prepared and in my opinion was looking quite good! The greens speed has come right up as it has been so dry and the growth has checked back. We pushed the greens this week and they where really fast but now we will rest them and get them back to a more regular speed.

We have also marked out the winter greens and will start preparing them for the cold weather. Please treat these areas as GUR.

Dry and windy

We've been enjoying the dry and windy weather in the last few weeks. The course is looking well as we are getting dry cuts. We have raised our height of cut on the greens to help to protect them going into the cooler months. The speed hasn't gone down in fact if anything the have sped up as its been dry and we've been able to use the tru turf a lot. The temperatures have also dropped, this means the growth has started to check back.

Top dressing

The osprey greens have been sarel rolled (creates pockets for seed), over seeded and top dressed. The greens have then had a drag mat over them. We kept the sarel rollers on for the first drag as this helps to get more seed into the greens profile.

Still dry

The course is drying out nicely and the surfaces have generally firmed up. We are giving both courses full cuts this week and the definition is coming up nicely. We have sarel rolled the greens, this great for getting air into the profile and breaks up surface tension.

One thing which is slightly annoying is a golfer felt the need to pull there trolley over the 14th green. The fertiliser we put out clearly showed the trolley mark over the greens, some golfers etiquette baffles me.

Scottish Par 3 Championship @ Piperdam

Hopefully a dry week at last

The weather has continued to be horrendously wet with it being the wettest summer in 100 years. We've managed to get good surfaces 99% of the time but last week was to much. The course flooded 3 out of the last 7 days it made maintenance impossible. We had very limited cutting during the week and we weren't able to touch the greens at all at the weekend because they where just so soft. The course can deal with a lot of rain but with the summer we've had it's just not been able to drain away. We need to carry on our top dressing and using the graden machine to ensure that we keep removing and diluting the thatch content. This will aid in firming the surfaces up and help water pass through them. The graden work we did a few weeks ago has generally healed over nicely with only faint lines remaining.

On a positive note the forecast is good this week and already the surfaces are returning to normal. With the course being so wet it takes a couple of days to firm up again.

We've fed the greens with a marathon 5-0-27, this will give the plant some strength going into the back end of the season.