Summer 2024 Head Greenkeepers Course Update

This update bulletin is to provide members with detail on various matters concerning the course, including recent and ongoing project work and also some information which I hope you will find interesting and useful about maintenance routines.

We have an agreed schedule of work on larger items that will be ongoing over the coming months and which we will be undertaking alongside day-to-day maintenance work on the course.

The timing and speed at which we are able to complete this work depends on a lot of different factors, including weather, equipment availability, other priorities arising and also on some larger things, help from volunteers, without whose assistance we couldn’t achieve some of the things we have been able to within our budget.

Some of the work below is already part-complete:

As you will all have seen, we are part-way through work on the extension of the drainage ditch on the 6th hole, where the next steps will be to install pipework and build a number of earth bridges as crossing points. We also plan to extend the start of the ditch on the 4th hole. With higher volumes of rainfall and storms, certainly throughout the winter, a stream of rainwater is often seen running from the 6th down the banking to the 4th near the laurels by the 13th tee. This adds to the saturation at the start of the 4th fairway. The extension of the ditch will enable a higher water catchment from surface water run off during high levels of rain from the 6th to the 4th.

In due course we will also be extending the 6th hole ditch that currently ends near the 16th tee up into the trees alongside the 3rd hole to a point between the Bell Tree and the valley on that hole in order to divert as much water flow as possible.

At the same time as extending the drainage ditch on the 6th we have used the soil that has been removed to create the new mounds to the left of the 6th green, which will now hopefully divert water-flow away from the left-hand greenside bunker. These will be extended a little further yet, to protect the left-hand bunker as much as possible, then we will be shaping and turfing these mounds as and when our general maintenance schedule allows

As everyone knows, the 3rd hole suffers badly from saturation during periods of bad weather, with water running onto the course from the Coach Road area above it. We have spent some time looking at this issue and have decided that we can get the greatest impact at a reasonable cost by creating a new ditch along the full length of the topside of the 3rd, close to the existing tree line. We do not currently have a timeline for this piece of work.

The bridge over Trevor’s Pond has been repaired recently by Paul McVey, to whom we are extremely grateful for his time and effort.

Several ideas have been considered to restore the pond itself, one of which was to fill in the area and turn it into a flower bed. However, following much discussion, we now plan to reinstate the pond with a new puncture-resistant liner and to replicate the same sized pond on the right-hand side of the bridge, replacing the sleeper ditch that was there previously.

The condition of the sleepers had deteriorated and would have required a fair bit of work to rectify the issues that had occurred. We believe that matching ponds either side of the bridge will be a more attractive, aesthetical feature for the 7th than replacing the sleepers and retaining the original design. Works for this are now ongoing.

At the same time as we carry out the next stage of work on the drainage ditch running from the 6th to the 3rd hole, we will be using the earth from creating the ditch to build an extension to the 12th tee, which as you will know, is one of the smallest on the course and suffers from extra wear and tear as a result.

In the last few months we have removed around 60 trees from the course, partly as pre- planned thinning but also due to wind-damage which caused several large trees to fall. We have a number of stumps still remaining on the course, which we plan to remove in sequence at the end of the Summer golfing season when we can allocate the manpower needed to do this.

When time allows, I plan to take some time out to write again about our course maintenance routines as I think it would be helpful for members to understand some of the detail behind what we do, how and why.

In the meantime though, I just wanted to mention a few things:

Greens:

• Will be maintained to a bench set height of 4.0 mm now as far as possible through the rest of the Summer playing season.
• Stimpmeter Readings: for those who are interested, the greens have been running at 11.5 and 11.7 for the last 2 Saturday competitions (16th & 23rd June).
• Periods of prolonged drought or very wet weather can affect cutting height decisions, which are partly dictated by a balanced need to maintain general greens health and condition.
• Will aim to cut on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays during the Summer season in normal circumstances but on occasion, we must change this due to other issue arising.
• Greens will also be rolled on Wednesdays and Saturdays in normal circumstances.

Bunkers

• Will be raked on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
• For the last 6 months the team has been using new rakes, which achieve a deeper reach in the sand and result in a better quality of sand to play from.
• Please be aware that for historical reasons we have slightly different sand types in our bunkers around the course due to some being new or having the sand replaced and others still containing the original sand. Ideally, we would like to have the same sand type in all our bunkers eventually, subject to budget availability.
• Please see “Taking Care of The Course” section below – the quality of raking by players has a real impact on the quality of bunkers for everyone.

The Rough

• We have 3 different cuts of rough during the Summer playing season and 1 cut during the winter.
• Due to the long period of wet weather in late winter and early Spring, we were only able to introduce the first cut in mid-May. We would normally try to do this a couple of weeks earlier in the season, but we did mange to achieve this before most other local courses this year.
• The cutting heights for the rough are always maintained at the same levels in the Summer season, which are 1 ¼”, 1 ¾” and 4” for the 3 cut heights.
• Although cut heights remain consistent, weather conditions will affect the density of the grass in the rough and therefore the degree of playing difficulty, with the strongest grass growth always occurring in Spring, which is why the rough was particularly challenging a month or so back.
• We have recently started cutting the rough in and around the valley on the 3rd hole to first-cut height in an attempt to create better lies for playing out of this area.

Tees

• We have carried out verti-cutting on all the tees very recently to remove the long strands of grass, which has hopefully improved the appearance of the tees.

We appreciate that sometimes people are under time-pressure or other things are going on during a round which take your attention, but we would like to respectfully ask everyone to always follow the normal, established routines for:

• Replacing divots carefully (including in the rough, where possible).
• Repairing pitch marks.
• Raking bunkers properly and thoroughly (to always ensure there are no obvious places where a bad lie could occur for the people playing behind you).

We will also be doing what we can to ensure that visitors are aware of the course standards we are trying to achieve and will be asking for their help on this front as well. We want members and visitors to enjoy the course, respect it at the same time and recommend it to their friends.

Lastly, Richard and I would like to say a warm thank you to the people who have provide their time and expertise on different pieces of work, that simply wouldn’t have happened without them.

Terry Daynes: excavation work to new drainage ditches Paul McVey: repairing Trevor’s Pond bridge.

Steve Brown and Shaun Higgins: for their ongoing help on all sorts of repeat jobs that arise around the course, which go unseen in the main and which the Greenkeeping team often does not have the time to tackle as quickly as is needed.

As a small team and working within a limited budget, there are sometimes things that we would like to be able to do on the course but simply do not have the time or manpower to do so. This can range from clearing up after bad weather to filling in fairway divots and clearing overgrown areas of the course.

We are working hard to continually improve the course and we hope that you have noticed some of this work in recent months. In order to keep up the course standards we think everyone wants to see, and to continually move forward, we would like to be able to ask for volunteer help on occasion, usually just for a few hours. With this in mind, Richard will be putting out a request in the next week or so for an indication of numbers of members who might be able to help from time-to-time as a first step.

We welcome constructive feedback and suggestions as we understand that there will  always be views about the course and the work of the Greenkeeping Team. Or you may just have a question you would like to ask.

We can’t always promise to reply straightaway but if you want to message us, please contact Richard, whose e mail address is r.lw@sky.com.

On a final point, we have been working our way gradually through all the feedback about the course in the recent Members Survey and we hope that many of you will see some actions being taken or things communicated that address your points and suggestions.

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of the Summer golfing season.

Kind Regards

Ryan Jackson

Head Greenkeeper