Monday 28 October 2013

Four seasons in one day!

What a mixed bag of weather were having at the moment, today we encountered strong winds, heavy rain,glorious sunshine and a minute later hailstones!
The wet weather has certainly returned with 75 mm of rain falling in less than a week and on a site where the water table is high at the best of times this has caused a bit of water to remain in a few of the bunkers but the rest of the course is draining well, but we cannot beat mother nature and im sure that the extensive drainage system the Roger and his team have installed that these will cope with the majority of what falls on the playing areas.
The wet and mild weather has been of great assistance in helping all the greens that were overseeded with fescue last week in germinating,hopefully we will see the germination towards the end of the week.The seed will then be helped with a organic seaweed (high salt index fertilizers and iron are detremental to seed) to help germination also.Interstingly for you to know I asked Johnsons who supply the fescue seed to add a Myccorhizea coating to the seed which does this-
:Mycorrhizal fungi are a remarkable group of organisms that have been benefiting plants for at least 500 million years.
At the dawn of time when plants were just beginning to colonise our planet mycorrhizal fungi were there living in a symbiotic relationship with plants enabling them to extract nutrients and hold onto water in very difficult soil conditions.
In effect, the fungus provides a secondary root system, a system that is considerably more efficient and extensive than the plants own root system.
These fungi are living organisms and will live with the plant, sourcing a continued nutrient supply for its entire lifetime – a truly sustainable plant nutrition solution. In exchange the plant provides carbon and sugars to the fungi. Not unsurprisingly, 90% of all land plants employ this relationship to enhance their own root system’s capacity to deliver nutrients.
A very interesting fact and im sure that we will see the added benefits of the Myccorhizal coating,science and nature working together!Marvellous!
The overseeding was carried out with a 13mm solid tine going down to a depth of 9mm then the braodcasted seed was brushed into the holes, the holes in the picture below are packed with fescues!As you can see in the following picture we topresessed to fill in the remainder of the holes and to provide a growing medium for the seed to germinate in and to level off the surfaces.
The greens are currently looking very healthy with both the bents and fescues looking very happy,the fescues have certainly perked up a little in the last week or so and we will b looking to give them some seaweed and  iron going into the winter.




As you can see here in this picture we have also started the major winter work programme on the changes to the 17th hole,this will take a while.We have made a temporary green just short of the cross bunker for play during the week so that we can carry on with work so that disruption to play will be minimal and of course the safety of the staff whilst working on the reconstruction.It's still a tough hole ! We will because of the recent favourable weather to overseed be putting the vertidraining of the greens on hold for the time being as not to disturb the seed,after all it is an investment in the greens.We will however be commencing vertidraining of approaches and pencil tining of the tees this week.Get that air in there for a nice healthy plant.



There is plenty of other work going on on the links with blocking/turfing ongoing on heavy wear areas, rabbit holes etc and divoting etc which all makes such a difference to the links presentation.

Agian, many thanks to all the staff for all their hard work.

Happy golfing,

Royal St David's Links team.

No comments:

Post a Comment