Golf
we would go again.” “In those days, we never left
the site we were working in and we would have baked potatoes for lunch. The lads and I would bring tubs of grated cheese, baked beans, pierce the lid and stand the tin on the edge of the fire. We’d even have prawns and crème fraiche. Our then boss, Pete Vermuelen, the father of my current boss, would join us in his camel coat, flat cap, wellies and leather gloves. He would always stop, look at his watch and say “late lunch?”, which was the cue for him to join us. Good memories for me.” “There is still plenty of tree
work to be done with raising canopies and keeping branches out of roll bar height. When we do get a good storm, we sometimes lose a tree or two, so there are a couple of areas on the course where we do a regularly burn; well out the way of the golfers, of course.” “We don’t have a written
environmental plan as such, but we do have a written plan for an area of SSSI that has some rare orchids, so there are management restrictions that we follow for this area, although the orchids are now popping up in many areas of the course.” “My engineer Geoff is the
‘bird man’ and he has put up bird boxes, including a couple for owls, and I wouldn’t dare ask any of the lads to strim or remove any reeds from ditches or lakes until the reed warblers have fledged. It did happen once, but never again; an angry engineer is not something to be confronted!” “Chemicals are kept in a
proper safe storage cabinet and are used only if cultural practices are insufficient to keep the turf healthy, and then only when damage occurs to a larger proportion of turf than is unacceptable, and then only by qualified staff.” “We try to combat diseases with cultural practices rather than just grab the chemical and spray, but this is not always possible. Being in the middle of farmland, we get seed drifting in all the time so, when our job is to enhance plant growing conditions, we are at war with weeds all the time. We spray the greens and tees early in the season, but it would be far too expensive to blanket spray the course, so the lads and I go out with knives or weed wands
several times a year on the greens.”
“We do suffer from disease
attacks now and again. It always amazes me when I read statements like; ‘we haven’t sprayed for disease for so many years now’. Well, I can say the same, but that does not mean we haven’t been affected, it means we were in a better place to combat it culturally and watch it grow out.” “Since our aeration regime
has been stepped up, we do suffer less than before, but we hardly escape totally. I’m not one who irrigates to excess, I am not too bothered about what the greens look like, it is more how they play. Our agronomist, George Shiels, when trying to explain my point of view to my boss, said; ‘we play on grass, not on colour’. That about sums me up perfectly.” “George’s input is invaluable and he always keeps me abreast of new products or cultivars that we could use in certain areas that are struggling. He visits us at least once a year, sometimes more, and it’s good to get a view from someone who only sees the course on an irregular basis. You sometimes look at problems and can’t see the wood for the trees. Then the magic man comes along and opens your eyes, just like that. He is always at the end of the phone or an email away, so is always available to me, not just on visit days.” “We are very lucky in Guernsey as we have no foxes, badgers or moles; it’s a bit of a groundsman’s paradise in that respect. What we do have are thousands of birds. We have all the common and garden varieties and, being next to the sea, we have gulls and terns. We have owls and marsh harriers, as well as the usual birds of prey and, around the course, you will always see mallards, coots, moorhens, pheasants and geese. It is the latter that are the problem, not the Brent or Canada that we see now and again, nor the pair of Bar Headed geese that moved in about six months ago. It is the Greylags that are my problem; they insist on digging in any puddle that appears on the greens after heavy rain and also pecking any repairs that we make; with the amount of mess they leave, you would think you had thousands of them. We
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the missing piece that t the miss makes all the difference! PC JUNE/JULY 2015 I 27
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