trials have been limited to a nursery area, which will be monitored with soil testing in 2010.” With regards to the tees he adds “The tees follow a similar nutrition programme as the greens currently, but this may change depending on budget allowances and environmental requirements. The fairways are more simplistic in their nutritional approach, which includes potassium nitrate, calcium nitrate and a slow release product containing low Nitrogen, low Phosphate and high Potassium. At renovation time we supplement the rootzone with gypsum, blood and bone meal and palletised chicken manure (as per fertility analysis results).”
As Bahrain is an isolated island almost all consumables are purchased from international suppliers. The Royal Golf Club has a long-established relationship with Environmental Turf Technology (ETT) from the UK. ETT provide the club (through the Managing Director, Richard Lawrence) a high proportion of their fertilisers and support the club through event sponsorship.
Irrigation management
Through the peak summer months of June, July and August, where temperatures can reach as high as 50O
C,
the system can lose as much as 12mm of water each day. It is important to have good monitoring systems in place as the sand greens only hold about 20-25mm of available water at field capacity. The club team uses a combination of the data from an on-site weather station, which records evapotranspiration, humidity, wind speed and rainfall. They also use a hand held volumetric moisture probe, on a daily basis, to assess each individual hole. “There are a number of holes on our course that are either exposed and sheltered from the weather elements, and this greatly affects irrigation requirements” said Mark. “We aim to try and keep volumetric moisture levels at around 12%-15% through the summer months and 8-10% in the winter months.”
High winds in Bahrain have also
resulted in windblown fine sand and silt contamination migrating from the local surrounding construction. This has caused layering and some moisture
26
retention problems on a few of the exposed greens. This has influenced the volumetric water percentage measurements, as the top 25mm retains a lot of moisture and artificially increases readings. The wind blown material is also very high in salt content. Fortunately, the paspalum has not been greatly affected by this. “Winter months in Bahrain are cool and windy (
C), and the paspalum
goes dormant in late December through to late March. During the winter months evapotranspiration is minimal and we concentrate efforts on maintenance and servicing of our irrigation system.” To cope with irrigation requirements, the club has a reverse osmosis water plant that produces approximately 6000m3
of water on a daily basis. Once
the entire residential development (1000 homes) is completed, this supply will be supplemented with a further 3000m3
of
treated sewerage effluent. This supply ensures both the golf course and all landscaping on the entire development has the required water supply to meet demand.
Overseeding
Being a young course, still in development mode, Mark has not scheduled any winter overseeding in 2009. He expands on this; “once the course has another growing season (2010) we will look to overseed our fairways and roughs. This year we invested in a Redexim drill seeder and we imported some high quality perennial ryegrass from New Zealand. We have run a seeding trial on our turf nursery this year to assess rates and sand topdressing requirements. We hope to be able to reduce seed and sand requirements by using a drilling machine (rather than a drop or spreader seeder on the surface of the paspalum).” Results to date have been encouraging. They sowed seed at rates of 300, 400 and 500kg/ha into 400m2
plots and
topdressed 50% of the plots with sand. The half which was topdressed with sand germinated about two days earlier than the other side but, after three weeks, there is little to no difference between the two sides.
Mark says, “the main drawback with paspalum is that it’s not very wear tolerant. Buggy wear, coupled with winter
dormancy, results in short rough through high traffic areas, and we have found that many golfers are finding themselves in fairway lined bunkers or desert areas when their ball should have been held up by longer turf grass growth.”
Renovation
The course is renovated twice a year. Renovation includes scarifying to a depth of around 5mm and hollow tine coring, followed by intensive dragging, fertilising and sand topdressing. Renovation is completed in early spring (March), which helps to ‘wake up’ the plant as it comes out of dormancy. The second renovation is usually
carried out at the end of August, which is hot and humid, so the grass recovers well at a peak growth time. On top of the renovations the team topdress the greens every two to three weeks during the growing season, with very light dustings (less than 1mm) in combination with vertical mowing. The fairways and tees are topdressed 3-4 times per year outside of renovations.
As this is a new course, Mark sees it as important to adjust and continually improve surface levels on an ongoing basis to achieve a smooth and firm surface. To achieve this they did lots of heavy rolling during the grow-in to improve levels and reduce wind erosion. As a result, the first two renovations produced excess sand on the surface as the rootzone was compacted. This negated the requirement for topdressing sand, and helped level off any additional depressions that had developed on the fairways and tees.
Pest control strategies
Although the Royal Golf Club currently has a pure sward of paspalum it is possible to use rock salt to spot treat unwanted weeds. Fortunately, paspalum has a very high salt tolerance and pure salt can be used effectively as a weed killer. At this stage, the team hand weeds any contamination with reasonable success. Roundup herbicide is also used in managing this task. Mark’s team paint the chemical onto the weeds, translocating into the plant without damaging the paspalum. Insect pests are a much bigger
problem than weeds or fungal diseases. “In Bahrain we specifically suffer from
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