Course Update 14 November 2017
Drying out….
Greetings from the your friendly ‘Greenies’! We hope you are enjoying the drier weather of late despite it being a little windy.
The firmer ground conditions have really helped us to get through our winter maintenance work which was deferred due to the relentless wet conditions. The mown rough is looking better and we have received positive feedback that the course is playing well. We have taken the opportunity to cut it a little shorter than we have done in the past, especially close to the Fairways and Greens.
On the Fairways, we have now sprayed two applications of herbicides in most areas to control Daisies, Kikuyu, Onehunga weed and Clover. The results so far seem to be promising as you can see in the images below taken on the first Fairway. These weeds are extremely resilient, hopefully this will take care of them for a while. Next week we plan to mechanically ‘slice’ and fertilize all the fairways with organic fertilizer which will give us the lush dense playing surfaces on the Fairways that we need for summer.
Kikuyu being controlled by herbicides.
Daisies being controlled by herbicides.
We have also applied the same mix of herbicides to the Tees and we look forward to a similar result. However, this mix of herbicides will result in the Tees turning a little ‘Yellow’ (Chlorosis) for about 2-3 weeks but after that the colour will return and the weeds should be controlled. If not, we will spray a second application to achieve the desired results.
The Greens have benefitted from the spring weather and coring that we performed only 7 weeks ago. We have been able to start applying growth regulators to the Greens to improve the speed of the Greens while at the same time helping to suppress Poa.
We recently invited Will Bowden from Sports Surface Design and Management to perform a battery of tests on a sample of our Greens to evaluate a number of factors (which we perform every year in Spring). Two of the performance factors that we tested were Firmness of the Greens (Clegg Hammer test) and ball roll or ‘trueness’ of the Greens (Parry Meter test). This testing was performed on a Thursday afternoon, only 5 weeks after coring the Greens. I am pleased to report that the results were that the Greens firmness were in the ideal range and denoted as ‘Firm’ despite the recent coring and the Greens still being wet from all the rain.
Clegg Hammer tester.
The Parry Meter test performed by Will revealed that the Greens, “Trueness of putting surfaces appropriate for type of course and time of year”. If we had performed the testing in the morning before play and if pitch marks were properly repaired we would have had even better results.
It was noted that the 1st Green Parry Meter testing was one of the worst performing and much of this can be attributed to improperly repaired pitch marks (this Green had the most amount of pitch marks). What was most interesting is that the 11th and 17th Greens results were, “Target for high quality Greens”; they seem to have less pitch marks on them than most of the other Greens on the course.
The scientific evidence would suggest thus that the less pitch marks there are on the Greens the better in terms of ‘trueness’ of the Greens. Improperly repaired/not repaired pitch marks amplify the problem and will have a long lasting effect on the ‘trueness’ of the Greens.
I am sure you will agree that based on the above test it is even more important to fix pitch marks on the Greens, not only for your benefit but for all members and guests.
Parry Meter
We hope you have a great week and we will keep you posted with regards to upcoming works.
Regards
Spencer and the ‘Greenies’