From February through to beginning of May

It has been some time since my last post so I will aim to bring you up to date using a number of picture of work completed on the courses along with information to go with them.

Presentation is always high on the agenda and with reasonable conditions during late winter and into spring we have been able to continue with pedestrian mowing of tees and greens, this is still continuing to date. We feel pedestrian mowing although time consuming gives us a better finish and appearance. When conditions and work schedules limit the time available we will go back to ride on mowing but still aim to get the pedestrian mowers out from time to time.

We spend a lot of time setting up mowers correctly especially coming into the growing season, we make sure cut quality is good with regular sharpening and as you can see above making sure the height of cut is correct. We are currently cutting greens at 4mm, this is our regular summer height. During the winter period the greens height is raised to 5.5mm. The summer height of cut for the collars and aprons is 10mm and our fairway summer height of cut is 12mm.

This picture was taken of the 10th Highgate in early April.

We then completed scheduled aeration work on both courses during April, when we do some deep solid tinning with 12mm tines to a depth of around 8-10 inches followed by some shallow 10mm solid tinning. This aeration compliments our regular in season aeration work of fortnightly 8mm slid tinning and weekly sorrel rolling. We have no need to complete disruptive hollow coring as we do not produce excessive organic matter which has to be removed and as a result can produce good playing surfaces for the majority of the year.

After the aeration work we then top dress and brush in as you can see here. When we do our scheduled spring and autumn aeration we apply in the region of 40 tonnes to the greens to be brushed into the holes. Our target for the year is between 150 and 200 tonnes, in season we top dress every two weeks when possible delivery around 12 tonnes per application. Top dressing is a very important process as it helps to keep the surfaces firm and smooth along with diluting organic matter and improving the drainage capabilities of the root zone. Making the root zone as dry as possible but retaining in the region of 10-15% moisture is the ideal environment to encourage the finer grasses which our management is geared around.

We are still having the odd frosty morning as can be seen here, this frosty Saturday back in April was not too server, the greens were ok but the surrounding areas had a good white frost on them.

Course furniture has also been given a little tidy up as you can see from the picture above with the addition of some nice new logo plaques.

Both course are now beginning to shape up. This picture was taken this morning after some massive rain storms yesterday afternoon, we recorded an inch of rain!