To summarize the week that was, besides being greeted with uprooted trees, snapped off branches and debris from tree line to tree line, we also had playing surfaces that hadn't seen a mower for six days and disease was setting in fast. The priority was getting the greens back in play and ensuring the putting surface was back to its high standard. We lifted the height of cut on the green's mowers to 5mm for the Tuesday mow. By doing this we were making sure that no scalping occurred, and the greens were not put under any more stress. That afternoon we applied a foliar brew of fertiliser, fungicide and growth retardant to help secure their recovery. Over the next few days, we dropped the height of cut from 5mm to 4mm then to the final height of 3mm for the Saturday competition. They look healthy and despite having 400+mm of rain washing all the sand out of the canopy are still rolling well.
The fairways and tees had to be blown off using our two tow behind turbine blowers before we could get a mower onto them. A big thankyou to our very own Club Manager David Hogben who spent an afternoon blowing debris off fairways and cart paths. Thanks David, nothing like a bit of multi-tasking from the man in charge. And speaking of multi-tasking a big shout out and thankyou to John, Jamie and Charlie from golf services for putting in a couple of days on course helping with the clean up as well. Many hands make light work and you guys certainly made a difference to the course recovery, thank you.
We managed to cut all the fairways over the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday period and although a little scalpy in areas I think they've mown up well and will only improve with more constant mowing. We also have applied a foliar fertiliser (20:0:0 Greensmax) and growth retardant (Primo) to all fairways and green surrounds. This will reduce horizontal growth and tighten up the playing surface.
There are still plenty of trees to clean up on course at the present time. We have prioritised firstly the dangerous trees, then the trees affecting golf, then the neighbouring trees in our tidy up efforts. We endeavour to have all trees and all debris off course in the coming weeks.
During our week of closure, we decided to turn a negative into a positive and renovated the step cuts on the green's perimeter. Firstly, they were scarified in a clockwise then anti clockwise direction before being mowed off at their current height of 8mm. These areas have not seen a renovation of any kind for several years and were in desperate need of a helping hand. The recovery should only take a couple of weeks, and we will try to top-dress them on a weekly basis.
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