GOLF
Sprinklers got
introduced to a very old course and suddenly
”
we're overwatering and overfeeding with
dominant rough grasses coming in, but I think we're starting to turn the corner
awarded Golf England’s ‘Championship Venue of the Year 2017,’ and it's easy to see why as we drive around on the E-Z-GO. To get the course to an award-winning standard, Glenn explains that it’s been a case of long-term aims with slow gains. “I think it was just a case of making my own mark on the course and trying to turn it back to be a little bit more of a links course than what it was,” he explained. “Having worked here for those years, you notice things going differently and it didn't sit right; things like the bunkers. We’re trying to get back to revetted bunkers, tighter fairways, and the big one was trying to introduce more fescue into the greens with bent because we were nearly 90% poa. Sprinklers got introduced to a very old course and suddenly we're overwatering and overfeeding with dominant rough grasses coming in, but I think we're starting to turn the corner.” “We started ten years ago, and we had two options; we could go for the fast route that would disturb the play for four to five
years quite heavily, or a slow and steady way that would avoid that disturbance, and that's what the club decided to go for. We transferred to pure sand topdressing to try and neutralise the soil because there was a lot of thatch and a lot of rich soil where we'd been using different dressings, so I wanted to get more sand in to help it dry out and start to try and push it.”
“The bent took reasonably well and I don't think you ever win that battle with the poa, but we're getting closer than where we were, so that's rewarding. We're probably about 30-40% poa now, which is a big switch and it should enable us to start tackling areas, but again it all goes back to the budget and how many times you can overseed each year; and we had to drop some out for a few years when it was tough. When I took over, there was only six of us, and we needed to target certain areas.” “Now we’ve progressed a bit, we’ve been able to start looking at other areas like ecology and bees, but selling it to the club was never that easy. Over the years, we’ve
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PC August/September 2019
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