Course Conditions

Course Report

November 2011

COURSE

PLACING

Placing can be within one club length through the green. Hopefully a sensible “eyeballing” approach can be used to keep speed of play up. 

Thankfully the weather has been kind to the efforts to seed the fairways and evidence of germination can be seen. Hopefully the one club length placing has been widely used to save the bare areas.
Chris felt a particular area that requires protection is the right hand side of the 11th. We are keen to minimise wear in these high traffic areas. Another area that is being considered is to direct all traffic to the left of the 16th green so players will walk straight up the 17th tee. This should avoid the bank of the tee becoming very muddy through the winter.
Signs have been placed in the buggies stopping them using the fairways. They should be driven in the semi-rough until level with the ball. Please mention this to anyone who does not appear to be doing this.

Phil Thomason - Greens Chairman.

The Leicestershire Golf Club
Fairway Summary

Scenario

The fairways at The Leicestershire have suffered exceptional drought stress through 2011, akin, but even worse to 1976, when the rains started again at the end of August.
This autumn so far we’ve only received 55% of our normal rainfall in combination with record high temperatures and following on from our driest Spring ever on record.

The ridge and furrow fairways on the course have coped least well with the above extremes, particularly the top of the ridges, as water is designed to be shed from the surface into the furrows and in addition, being 20 – 40cm higher than the normal fairway height, they are prone to dessication in warm, windy weather. Other local courses with ridge and furrow fairways, like Kibworth and Market Harborough are in a similar condition. If you look at the non ridge and furrow fairways on the course, they are thinner than normal because of the drought, but have retained good grass cover.

Strategy - Plan A

The plan in place for October was to overseed the weak / bare areas of the fairways using a disc seeder that makes a slit through the surface and introduces the seed in behind it. For overseeding to work, you need a number of factors to be present, these include adequate soil temperature (above 6°C), soil moisture and the most critical, seed to soil contact.

The surface of the ridges on the fairways contain organic matter, created from dead and dying grass and this has similar properties to cardboard, in that it is extremely hard and water repellent when dry, but once wet, it stays saturated.

If seed is introduced into surface fibre, without making soil contact, it will either rot during periods of wet weather, or burn off and die, as it germinates into a moisture-deficient environment.
The idea behind using a disc seeder was to ensure seed-soil contact, however when the machine was used on Monday (3rd October), the ground was so hard (because of the drought) that it could not penetrate the surface. For this reason, we’ve had to formulate a plan B strategy because as we all know, ‘Fail to plan, plan to fail’.

Strategy - Plan B

With rainfall over the last two days, the surface has wetted up to a depth of 4mm, and with more rain forecast early next week, the plan is to remove some of the surface fibre on the fairways next week, with a Vee-Mow machine and in addition punch holes through the remaining fibre to facilitate water movement into the soil below.

All the fairways will then be sprayed with a fertiliser-surfactant combination, which will encourage and thicken the existing grass and speed up water movement. (courtesy of the surfactant technology utilised)

Trials carried out over August and September showed that areas treated with a surfactant took 8 seconds for water to penetrate, with no run-off, whereas untreated areas took up to 18 seconds and most of the water ran off the surface, because of the hydrophobic (water repellent) nature of the surface fibre. Weather allowing, the remaining thin areas of the ridges will then be overseeded.

The rest is up to Mother Nature and although we are odds on to endure another hard winter in terms of frost and snow, there is no idea when this will begin, it may be like last year (late November) or like previous years (Christmas onwards). Either way, what we can be sure of is that if we do nothing, the fairways will come into next Spring thinner and with bare areas and this we cannot allow.

Success!

Chris Lewis – Course Manager – The Leicestershire Golf Club