Greens renovated

The greens have been renovated and after a day and being rubbed in twice they are looking pretty good. This renovation was much less aggressive than the spring renovation. We used a Verti-drain machine with thin solid tines causing less disruption to the surface. Fertiliser and around half the sand of the major renovation was then applied and rubbed in. After a couple more days with some growth and watering the sand should be well into the grass canopy.

In the next couple of weeks we will attack some of the areas of the fairways that died off as a result of the hot weather through January. These areas will be cored, scarified, seeded and top dressed lightly so that we can get a good cover of grass back on our fairways before winter.

There have been a number of valves getting stuck on over recent months causing areas of the course to be flooded on occasions. This is mainly due to grit and slime (technical term) that is pumped from the dam getting into the valves and causing them to stick on. Since the recent rains we are pumping cleaner water as the dam depth has increased. With this and the cleaning of a number of the problem valves we should see less of this in the future.

As part of our bunker plan we are also looking at filling and grassing bunkers that are hard to maintain and provide little strategic value to the hole. At this stage we have identified the back left bunker on the 18th green and the first of the 3 fairway bunkers on the 3rd hole. Both of these will be filled and grassed in the coming months.

18th green on Monday afternoon

Close-up of the 18th - same time as above

18th green 2 days later