April 2015

This month has been a busy one getting back in to the cutting regime. The course is now taking shape for the coming season, definition is pretty good already and the greens are recovering very well from the fusarium scarring.

We have had a staff shuffle, with one being laid off and my Deputy leaving to go to Royal Dornoch as an assistant greenkeeper. We interviewed two impressive candidates to replace Craig and have a Dornoch native starting when he returns from his travels in New Zealand. We wish Craig all the very best in his new position at Royal Dornoch and also Stuart, our labourer, who is also starting at Royal Dornoch for the summer. Both will be a credit to their team over there. This season we are back to 3 staff so I'm sure that will present many challenges in trying to maintain the course to previous standards. As usual though, I'm sure we will rise to the challenge and ensure surfaces are as good as anywhere around during the main playing season.

On the greens, we have applied more dressing at the start of the month, taking us to over 100Tonnes of sand dressing for this year already. Surfaces are very firm and there's a great coverage of Bent in there. We overseeded just over a week ago with a Vredo borrowed from Royal Dornoch. It's a great machine and very quick. We had 250kg drilled in to the greens, BarFescue and also Bar2. We will follow up with our own seeder (Charterhouse) in May, June and possibly July. We are making a very conscious effort to get as much fescue in to them as possible to take advantage of the thinner sward we have at the start of this season. Dressings will now be far lighter, a little less frequent (fortnightly) and the focus now will be on establishing the fescues in to the sward and hopefully increasing year round playability.

Our new greens mower will be arriving any day now, a Jacobsen Eclipse 322. I'm very much looking forward to this true hybrid machine arriving as it is extremely versatile in terms of clip rate and gives us good options for our greens program. It uses less than half the diesel of our current GM3250 and offers great savings over a season. Our current GM3250 will be used for surrounds, with the added bonus of being a backup for greens, verti-cutting and also for use after top dressing.

This coming month we will be starting the weed killing on the fairways, tees and surrounds. Divoting remains a never ending job but thankfully 4 members volunteered and made a start on the fairways which was much appreciated. Our feeding program on the greens and surrounds will start, as well as starting our wetting agent program too. We plan to run the vertidrain with 8mm tines over the greens later this month.

Jack, our apprentice, finishes his college training at Elmwood College next month. He is with us for another year to hone his skills and brush up on his knowledge of the job.

That's about it for this month. Enjoy your golf

Alexander.