Penn Pals! P
aul Mills has been Course Manager at Penn Golf Club for just nineteen months. Previously he was deputy
head greenkeeper at Stratford Upon Avon Golf Club and, before that, a greenkeeper at Bloxwich Golf Club. He has a team of four to assist him, Assistant Course Manager, Adam Jones, and greenkeepers Keith Swann, Phil Nixon and Paula Colley When Paul arrived at Penn he found a neglected heathland site, but one with huge biodiversity. Unfortunately, due to serious mismanagement, the course had fallen into disrepair and suffered a significant loss of habitat, issues that needed to be rectified as soon as possible. As a member of the recently formed Midlands Gingerbread Men, Paul has been able to call on their support whilst he undertakes these difficult tasks. In a relatively short space of time the fruits of his labours are already being seen and, whilst there is still a long way to go, he has found the support of the ‘Gingers’ invaluable. As a young greenkeeper he is only too
aware that he still has a lot to learn, and it is this learning process that resulted in Jonathan Wood, Course Manager at Enville Golf Club, organising a visit by the ‘Gingers’ to offer support and advice. These include greenkeepers from The Chase, Bewdley Pines, Trentham and Ombersley golf clubs who walked the course to see what Paul had already achieved. He takes up the story. “The greens are soil push up, with the
exception of the 3rd which is part soil push up and part sand. Soil is generally heavy throughout the site, with underlying clay. I inherited predominantly annual
The Gingerbreads hit the road. First stop is Penn Golf Club in Wolverhampton, where Head Greenkeeper, Paul Mills, has a mountain to climb to bring a neglected course back up to an acceptable standard
meadow grass greens with the usual problems: high organic matter levels which made them susceptible to disease, shallow root growth and poor draining. They performed okay in the summer but, beyond that, were pretty poor. The collars, fairways and tees all suffered with similar thatch problems. I have plenty of experience of managing Poa greens, but I had long decided that, when I got my chance to become a course manager, I would not be managing my course in that way. My team and I set about rectifying these problems by adopting a very austere management programme, primarily on the greens, to try and change the species composition to Bent and Fescue. We have, pretty much, done it by the
‘Jim Arthur’ book, but are, now, also under the guidance of STRI’s Andy Cole. There has been a notable change in species composition, drainage, firmness and resistance to fusarium. Because of our austere approach we have had outbreaks of Anthracnose. Two applications of fungicide have been applied this calendar year to combat that. In the last nineteen months we have deep scarified three times, using the Graden, regularly aerated with our vertidrain and sarrel spiked, combined with minimal irrigation, regular topdressing and major reductions in the amount of feed put on. We have found that the sarrel spiking has been an excellent way of keeping the surface open.
This year we are using just fifteen units
of Nitrogen (down thirty-five on the previous year’s fifty units), consisting of lawn sand, 8:0:0 organic seaweed and
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