It has been a while since my last report and during the early part of the season there have been perceived issues surrounding the greens. It is worthwhile to give some more explanation about how the greens have developed in the early season.
The greens at Wychwood are sand based greens and are slow to warm up at the beginning of the season. A proportion of the grasses on our greens are Poa Annua, which flowers in the Spring and is active at temperatures below 10 degrees, as opposed to the other grasses which need higher temperatures to promote healthy growth. During early May this year we had low ground temperatures and dry conditions and the Poa Annua became stressed and flowered in order to get the nourishment it required. The result of the flowering was that the greens were slower and slightly uneven which is not ideal for putting. A further factor is that Poa can flower even at very low cut heights meaning that cutting the greens down will only exacerbate the problem as will watering which will lower the temperature also favouring Poa. This is not a new phenomena and has happened before and will happen again next year, only this year the dry conditions coupled with low temperatures were worse than normal, as was experienced on many other courses with sand based greens. The climatic conditions will determine how severe it will be but it is inevitable and we will have to live with it. There are some herbicides and treatments that are being developed which may help and we will continue to monitor these with a view to using them in the future.
It is a regrettable that some of the members felt strong enough about it to lodge a formal complaint about something that was inevitable under the circumstances and was it really that bad, many thought not. It is interesting to note that the vast majority of the complainants have not bothered to use divot bags, perhaps an indication of how much they really care about the course.
We will be cutting back the heavy rough in the coming weeks as we did at the end of last season. Last year the ground was too wet to collect the cuttings but this time all the grass will be bailed and taken away. This will be repeated later in the season and the objective is to thin out the heavy growth making those areas more user friendly.
As you may have heard the capital has been made available to finally complete the renovation of the irrigation system. This involves the replacement of nearly all of the decoders which enable the system to be operated remotely. The timing of this work is difficult to predict as the parts are not readily available but it will proceed as quickly as practical. You will have seen over the last few weeks when the weather has been dry that the fairways have suffered. Although it is practical to manually operate the irrigation to the greens and tees it is very labour intensive if we want to extend that to the fairways. That is because in general the decoders operate 2 fairway sprinklers each and as there are hundreds of fairway sprinklers it is not possible to have any meaningful impact until we have remote control. The policy with fairways is to manage them to avoid excessive damage by controlling the height of cut and also in the use of wetting agents. Wetting agents allow water to penetrate dry areas allowing any water to be evenly distributed. Hopefully there is rain coming so I don't believe there will be a lasting effect on the fairways. The expenditure on the irrigation has been large and is a further demonstration of the financial commitment that the owners are prepared to put into the course.
I am sure that you are all seeing the course back to its usual Summer condition with the greens now up to their normal standard. This should last throughout the season so we can look forward to a course we can be proud of. Just the bunkers to sort out next!!