Thursday, April 21, 2011

Week 16 update


The Verti-Drain out and in action last week.

We have been doing areas of solid tyneing with the verti-drain over the last few weeks it is a slow process but so far so good we have done areas on the 15th,17th,18th,and 8th and 9th fairways. We will get it out again after easter and all the short weeks are over as this does soak up allot of man-hours.

The bunker on the 3rd left hand side has had a drainage inspection and it is as we thought all the sediment has filled the drainage line so we flushed it out and got it draining for the short term but we will have to get in and totally re-instate the whole drainage system in the next few months.

We have seeded the irrigation trenched on the tees and re top-dressed a lot of these, and the trenches on the fairway have also had allot of topping up done on them as well. We plan to over-sow with seed all the trenches over the next month or so.

The weeds in the greens have been sprayed, and you will notice them starting to wither away, we have also started to feed the greens up and get them ready to go into winter a bit stronger.

The drainage for the 6th green has been cleared in the creek, every time this creek area flows it covers up the drainage for the bunkers and green so we cleared it with a excavator and gave it some area to run into.
There is a tree down behind the 15th green it is too wet in there to get at the moment so it will be removed next week once the ground has dried out abit. till next time keep swinging.....pete

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Mounds between 8th and 9th

                                                     Trees On the Mounds


After advice from council and industry arbourists we have taken out the remaining dead trees as they are not going to come back.

After the floods it looked like we were going to loose 80 to 90 percent of the trees in the mounds, I then got advice that allot of these trees will come back if we give them some time and used our irrigation system to irrigate thus putting water up onto the leaves, so this is what we have been doing and it has worked very well as most trees came back with new growth and are recovering well. So in the end we actually only lost around 7 percent of the trees we have also cut back the grasses around the edges and some of these are going well others will have to be replanted out this winter.

So this is the reason that we left the trees in the mounds, to give them every opportunity to recover and so by not jumping in too early we have saved 40 to 60 trees that otherwise would have been removed unnecessarily.

Friday, April 1, 2011

week 13 update 2011

Well another week gone, this week we have put all our efforts into getting the bunkers back into a reasonable condition, and the course ready for monthly medals and pennants.

The problem with the bunkers is that the silt and sediment from the flood waters is still in the bottoms of the bunkers and mixed in with the sand, also it has clogged up the drainage pipes in the sumps under the bunkers thus every time it rains or even if we water too heavy the sediment comes to the top and clogs it all up. We have been scraping the mud off the top of the surface when ever we have time possible, but it is a long slow process and it is impossible to get it all.

This week we got all the greens sprayed for weeds, fertilized and rolling well for this weekend, I just hope the rain stays away.

This week we also took delivery of a verti-drain machine, it will be out next week doing the fairways that were worst affected and Ill do a separate blog next week on it. A special thanks to the fellows for putting substantial funds to purchase this piece of equipment it is a important piece of equipment that we now are able to utilize and as time goes buy I'm sure you'll notice areas improve because of the availability and flexibility of owning you own equipment. Thanks again for the funds being made available.

The irrigation installation is going along well, and this week a lot of time was put into topping up the trenches, next week will also continue on filling the sunken areas up. The areas left to irrigate are 14th fairway in the gully, all the 15th, 16th tee, 17th fairway, 2nd fairway and green and 3rd tee and half the fairway.

Well today is a bit sad in that Harley is finishing up after  nearly 4 years on the groundstaff  (Harley is going to give concreting a go as it is allot more wages than greenkeeping, )  all the best cob hope all goes well.

The council works department is still doing the sewage line replacement near the 7th tee and will possible be another two weeks.

Well that is about it for this week, keep well and keep swinging... pete