Golf Why greenkeeping?
“I wanted an outdoor job. A friend was a groundsman and suggested I give it a try, so I got a job at the civil service ground at Chiswick. I was lucky in that the team working there at the time taught me a lot.
From there I went to work at the Royal Parks in London, but couldn’t afford the cost of living in the capital on those wages, so moved to Dorset. I got a job as groundsman with the local schools. The job came up at Weymouth and here I am.
I had studied horticulture, which was useful for soils, fertility, botany and so on. In those days, there were very few colleges offering turfculture related courses; and none at all in Dorset. So I applied to take the IOG exams which I studied for and travelled up to London to take.
As far as I know, nobody else in the Dorset area had gone down this route and so, with no clear idea of what questions would be set, I tended to cram a lot more knowledge in than if I were at college. The fact that I was prepared to make the effort to learn, when nobody else tried, gave me a great advantage.”
What’s in the shed? Toro 3250 greens mower Jacobsen Eclipse hybrid greens mower John Deere 8700 fairway mower John Deere 8800 semi rough mower Toro Sidewinder Ransomes ride-on rotary mower
Cushman trucks x 3 with various attachments. Toro Multipro sprayer Kubota L4200 tractor
John Deere 3520 fitted with Lewis front loader and backhoe Charterhouse Verti-Drain John Deere Aerocore Turf-Co Wide Spin topdresser Tru-Turf greens iron Greentek Thatchaways and Overseeders John Deere pedestrian mowers x 4 Dabro mole plough Hunter Juno grinder
Key machinery, such as mowers, are bought on a five year rotation programme. All major items are bought on lease purchase agreements. We use local dealers.
All manufactures make their fair share of good equipment, so I prefer to buy the best that suits our needs, wherever it comes from.
We have a Course Care washdown area that is compliant with current legislation.
38 I PC FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016
Always closed ... to rarely closed
Rob Bayliss, Course Manager at Weymouth Golf Club, offers a practical guide to mole ploughing and the benefits it has brought to his course
W
hen the “course closed” sign goes up for weeks on end, as it often did, then drastic action needs to be taken. The lowest
point for us came in the winter of 1993/94 when the course closed for eighty-three days, including the Easter bank holiday. In fact, parts of the course remained shut for more than a quarter of the year. Predictably, this caused an exodus every spring of disgruntled members leaving to play elsewhere, as well as a drop in takings at the bar. Here is how Weymouth turned a reputation from “always closed” to “rarely closed”. James Braid was hired to design a layout on the western fringes of a town that, despite being famed for its sandy beach, is mostly built on clay, Oxford clay to be precise; one of the heavier clays found in Britain which crops up around the country. Great for making house bricks, but not the ideal foundation to build a golf course; but then we are not all blessed with acid sandy heaths on our doorstep, so greenkeepers need to make the best of what they have at their disposal.
Mole ploughing was first introduced as a method of draining heavy clay soils on farmland. Most turf management books usually contain a brief item on the topic which normally harks back to its agricultural origins. The purpose of this article relates the experience we have gained and sets out to explain how the technique can be adapted to give good results on sports turf. The essence of mole ploughing is to
produce a continuous channel in subsoils that contain 45% or more clay. Mole ploughing as a drainage system is relatively cheap, but the channels are relatively short lived and may require renewing every few years. During the first few years, an annual programme is advisable as the cumulative effect of several years work will bring the greatest benefit. The aim is to run the mole channels into either an open ditch or above a pipe drain backfilled with gravel but, before you start running a mole across the course, you need as much information about the site and its idiosyncrasies as you can get. Local knowledge should never be
undervalued and anyone new to an area should find out as much as possible. The chances are that if you have a problem on the site then, at some time in the past, your
predecessors will have tried to make improvements. Plans are a good place to start. If you
haven’t got any old records locked away in a dusty cupboard, it may be worth investigating local authority records, or ADAS sometimes keep records and they could be worth a phone call.
If nothing turns up, all is not lost as you should be able to identify the route of old drains simply by observation. It should be possible to devise a plan of land drains around the course that you can mole plough into. A line along the lower side of a fairway is usually enough. But, if water is coming from higher ground, a catch drain to collect water before it reaches a fairway will greatly assist.
Initially, we trialed a Dabro Mole plough on
our wettest fairways, because these determined whether the course remained open for play. The result was drier fairways, but the water was simply moved to the semi rough, so a plan of future drainage requirements was drawn up to take away the excess water. This consisted of a main drain alongside most fairways, feeding into our existing open ditches away from the main play areas. John Pierson was appointed as the contractor to install the main drainage, which included pipes from every bunker and amounted to just over 4,600 metres. Timing of operation differs somewhat from agricultural practice in as much that their optimum conditions are a soft subsoil to take the mole plough, but firm on the surface to take the weight of the tractor. Our priority is trying to keep the course
dry for play, so operations must start in autumn after the ground is sufficiently soft to take the mole plough, but before the ground gets so wet that you lose traction and damage turf. The aim is to finish mole ploughing the
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