Work Window Is Almost Over

We started our work to the greens on Monday the 2nd September. This consisted of a deep scarification of ALL putting surfaces. The scarification process with the Graden machine rips out the nasty thatchy organic matter and replaces it with some nice free draining sand. This process, I'm glad to say went like clockwork.....well almost. The lads have to fill the machine up with dry sand by hand through buckets just as this picture shows:

 I had 3 lads pouring in sand just like this. After they had used around 12 tonne I called the company supplying the sand for another 20tonne drop to come in on Tuesday afternoon/Wednesday morning. Only to be told that there was no more dry kiln sand!! All the bins were empty as lots of greenkeepers had seen the perfect weather and bought all the sand up!! I knew I had to take advantage of the weather so decided to change tactics when we ran out. We used all the dried sand on 16greens which meant 3 lads had poured in 20 tonne of sand through their buckets!! A good effort I'm sure you will agree, so thanks lads for your hard work!
For the final 4 greens (Yes we have 20 greens including the putting green and chipping green) I put a thick layer of topdressing onto greens 18, 17, 15 and 14 and allowed it to bake in the sun for an hour or so.





 The 18th green looked like this:

We allowed that to dry, and then ran the Verti Drain through it with 12mm solid tines on, with the idea of pushing some sand to the bottom of the holes:

 We then brushed the sand into the holes 

We then ran an empty Graden across the green and collected up:

After we gave it a final brush all was well! This process was quite long and drawn out, however it does have the added advantage of a nice deep solid tine. Then after the Graden goes through you would never know it had been tined!

The whole process took almost 4 days to complete, if we could have continued with the dry sand we would have easily completed by wednesday afternoon. The important thing for me to learn is to make sure I have my next 20tonne of sand on order ready for the next drop. Either that or increase the size of the bays so I can have 40tonnes delivered in one day. 

On Friday I was due to put some granular fertiliser on to help everything recover but the rain was a little too heavy and had actually puddled up some greens, so I decided not to. This went on on Monday the 9th. I will be spraying with a preventative fungicide on Wednesday weather permitting. Then its job done for another year. This should set us up now through all the wet winter months. 

Times like this test the team, as it is bleeding hard work and everyone must be singing from the same hymn sheet, I'd like to thank them all for pulling together and making this job as easy as it could have been for me!

I've already said that the lads actually picked up 20tonnes of  sand through 3 buckets, another interesting stat is that by controlling the graden through all those greens it worked out by my pedometer that I had actually walked over 31miles in 4 days. Not bad for an unfit bloke like me!! Where are my fags?!

Leigh