Carol Dutton meets the Course Manager at Thurlestone Golf Club in south Devon and asks ...
Yes - that’s him on the right with (l-r) Stewart Freeman, Paul Dyer, Matthew Dyer, Andrew Johnson and Daniel Pedrick
IS VIC THERE? C
limate change, demanding members, a ridiculously full fixtures list, a small staff and a course over 100 years old that wasn’t designed for large machinery - all these are familiar challenges for many head greenkeepers. Add an annual influx of golfing holiday makers and the maintenance of ten grass tennis courts and three public beaches to the list and you have some idea of the demands on Vic Dyer, Course Manager at Thurlestone Golf Club in South Devon. Somehow he manages it all, expertly, and still remains keen on the job and in love with his course. “We are an 18-hole links/cliff top
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course with terrific views,” he says. “We’ve got sand based greens and the links section, a third of the course, is all sand. Everything drains well and we often stay open here when everyone else is shut.” Vic has found the last two wet summers, and climate change in general, good for the course. “If we get a hot, dry summer followed by a cold autumn the grass doesn’t get a chance to recover,” he explains. “But the last two years, with wet summers and warm weather in the autumn, have given us good grass to go into the winter.”
Having lived in the area all his life, Vic remembers when the pipes used to freeze
up. “They don’t any more but we get gales from autumn onwards, which means that we can’t spray, not even with shrouded booms. This course was designed in 1897, part of it is on a slope, the tees are built up and the greens, like the rest of the course, were not designed for machinery.” In the autumn Vic and his five
greenstaff (two of whom are his sons) use a spot weedkiller on the greens and, in winter, they pull the weeds out manually. “If you do it quite often it’s not bad. We repair the pitch marks and pull the weeds out at the same time,” he explains. Milder winters, coupled with the impracticality of sprayed weed control in the autumn, means that, by early spring, weeds on the tees can need attention. “We use Headland’s Relay Turf, tank mixed with just two bags per hectare of their soluble Xtend (46:0:0) as an economical weed and feed, which lasts about six weeks. Spraying with herbicide puts the grass under stress, but Xtend helps it recover,” he explains. Vic is keen to encourage strong establishment in the spring and feeds greens with a ‘starter’ fertiliser. “We use Greentec Mosskiller 4:0:10 with 9% iron as a bit of a pre-season kick,” he
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