CAPEL GOLF COURSE MAINTENANCE

During the week we said farewell to Jimmy who as everyone knows, or should do, has been the Assistant Superintendent for the past 4 years. Jimmy has decided to work with a mining company, and take the ridiculous money they offer, I wish him well and commend him for the desire to get his young family ahead. Jimmy and myself started within a few weeks of each other in the winter of 2008, with absolutely no turf records on hand, no greenkeeper on staff to inform of any issues, we both thought through our own observations and testing at the time we were sitting pretty for the coming summer. How wrong we were, our first summer together on course was challenging to say the least, and we soon realised that not only were we dealing with different seasonal issues as we would expect, we both agreed it was like dealing with two entirely different golf courses so far removed from each other it wasn't funny. We often remark to this day the huge disparity between the golf course in summ

Each Winter the staff undertake a few major projects on the course, over the past few years that has included the installation of the front 9 auto retic, tree trimming works and last year the cleaning, re-piping of the back 9 manual system till the auto retic is fully installed. Sometimes the winter period is not conductive to the type of work such as turf establishment however with only 4 staff, manual water system and the extra mowing through the growing season time does not allow these extra works to be carried out, so tho not ideal for some projects, it is the only time we can commit to such works without affecting course quality. This winter period ( I should point out I am classing the winter period from when we turn off the irrigation pumps) some works planned are - Practice Chipping Green and Bunker To improve member practice facilities we will be constructing a 270m2 practice green, chipping area and practice bunker on the site of the existing practice bunker to the l

Over the next few weeks it will be routine maintenance only, course setup, mowing, irrigation etc. With Anthony at TAFE for 2 weeks and Dean on 1 weeks leave it is back to basics and will be attending Course presentation rather than starting any projects or extra work. We will be finishing the granular fertilising of the back 9 Tee to Green areas starting Sunday and with the manual irrigation on this side more time consuming watering in. There are a number of projects planned for the winter period and since there wont be much news from the course besides the weekly "same old same old" I will highlight those works over the coming few weeks. News from the past week, the greens are now sufficiently recovered to start dealing with the repercussion of not being able to spray for the couch encroachment, Saltene and late season crab grass prior to Reno's, with the chemical finally delivered we are commencing control of these weeds for transition, as for the crab grass which i

And on the 58th day it rained...well close enough, more like showers....after 57 days without precipitation we finally received some during the week, a total of 11mm fell, not allot but combined with the cooler weather we were able to switch off the irrigation pumps for a few days.  Green Renovation Recovery   Just over 3 weeks after green renovations and we are now at our normal mowing heights, we have upped the mowing to have them in pretty good shape for this weekend's Easter Medley, they will not be at the same pace as previous events, another week would have been perfect but we knew we only had 3 weeks to get them back and it was always going to be tight. They are rolling reasonably well and there shouldn't be any complaints. On the downside as expected the crab grass and couch has hung around and now visible this because we couldn't spray prior to renovations due to the national shortage of the chemical used, we received delivery yesterday and will be spraying next