with minimum feeding and watering, tend to encourage deep rooting. We have root mass growing down to 300 mm on some greens. The high content of fescues and bents means that our greens are finer textured which is ideal for firm and fast surfaces. We try to maintain stimpmeter readings to about 9.5 which, coupled with the slopes and contours of our greens, can make them very fast and challenging.


Since I have been here in 1991, we have very rarely sprayed any fungicides. The combination of good cultural practices of minimal applications of feeds and water combined with regular, brushing, grooming, verticutting and topdressing have reduced thatch content, thus reducing the chance of creating an environment for disease to establish. We only apply between 50-90Kg of


Nitrogen per hectare per year to the greens (even less on the Old Course) we take regular soil samples to ensure we know what nutrients are required. Our only other feeds are some seaweed products and the odd application of iron to harden up the greens prior to winter. The tees receive a similar amount and we don’t fertilise the fairways. Overseeding the greens is a difficult


process due to the constant demand for play and the fact that major or important tournaments are played during the optimum weather windows for germination, July to September. We are now trying to overseed any small areas at every opportunity and having large greens helps this. This year, our last major event, the Dunhill Links Championship, finishes on October 2nd. We will overseed straight after this event and hope soil and air temperatures are still favourable for effective seed germination.


All our courses have automated


irrigation systems. We spent over £2.5 million on upgrading our watering systems in 1998/1999. We can water greens, tees, fairways and aprons. We installed over 4000 sprinkler heads and laid over 12km of pipe work and 12km of communication and power cables. The irrigation storage tanks (850,000 gallon capacity) are fed by four large bore holes. The water from the bore holes produces water with a high pH of around 8.1. Before we use this we try to lower the water pH to 6.4-6.7 by burning sulphur and mixing the resulting product with the water in our holding tank Each head greenkeeper is in control of his own irrigation through six central controllers including a master computer. Each controller is connected to the weather station. All the


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information and data is monitored by each head greenkeeper, who then decides on the amount of water is delivered based on the weather forecasts and present condition of course. We are very well mechanised, utilising


Toro equipment for the maintenance of greens and tees, Ransomes/Jacobsen for fairways, semi rough and rough, Ford/New Holland and McCormick tractors, along with various other equipment.


All the courses are open seven days a week, except for the Old Course, which other than for a handful of particular events each year is closed on Sundays. We use this opportunity to carry out any necessary works to keep the Old Course in tip top condition and at the same time we avoid disturbing golfers. We are also governed by our


environment strategy which states that we endorse the adoption of environmentally friendly practices throughout the Links, and recognise the importance of such practices not only locally, but nationally and globally. These practices include waste minimisation and recycling, energy efficiency, minimal use of chemicals, water resource management and nature and landscape conservation. To achieve this it is important to keep up with legislation and technology changes.


Communication is a key element in achieving the high standards we set at St Andrews. All the greenkeeping staff have the opportunity to attend regular meetings and training days to keep them up to speed with the latest technologies. We are lucky in that along with Elmwood College, which is just down the road, we are able to send a number of our staff to various places to obtain the necessary training and education requirements to do their jobs. People come from all over the world to play the Old Course, and our job is to see that they get the best golf experience possible while they are here. The demand for golf is pretty much unrelenting; we cater for wall to wall golf almost all year round. We set ourselves high targets of customer satisfaction. We want everybody who comes to St Andrews to go away having fulfilled the dream they have come to expect from playing some of the best and most


challenging links golf


courses in the world.


“Communication is a key element in achieving


high standards” GORDON MOIR


Links Superintendent


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