Monday 23 March 2015

Fairway Vertidraining


We have started vertidraining the fairways with 18mm solid tynes to try and break up the hardpan under the surface. At the moment we are concentrating on the low areas on fairways that caused us problems last year with ponding for long periods of time after we received heavy rain early last year.

We have had a report done on our drainage issues in these areas by NZSTI and one of the recommendations in that report was to try and shatter the layer of  heavy, silty loam that sits on top of the sand profile. Our worst layer is on the 17th fairway which is more than 300mm thick in places and vertidraining will only punch down to about 250mm deep. I am hoping that we have some shattering affect that will crack through the layer in places and give us better water infiltration when we do get heavy rain. At least we will have a lot more air space in the soil profile that will hold more moisture when it does rain and hopefully get it away from the surface.

At the moment we have vertidrained the low areas on the 8th, 9th &17th fairways 3 times and increased the tyne depth 25 mm each time because the ground is so hard and the machine can't cope with full depth straight away. We are now at 175mm deep and will probably need to tyne these areas at least 3 more times before we are at our maximum depth. When we have completed these areas we will start on all fairways before winter hits. Most of our fairway drain fairly well because we don't have many areas with thick layers of silty loam so these won't need to be treated so severely and to such a depth. We should be able to easily punch holes down to 150-175mm without much problem as long as we avoid shallow pipework and cable which is always a possibility.



vertidrain with 18mm solid tyned

vertidrain holes in one of the hardpan areas on 17th fairway

Sunday 8 March 2015

Rain

Overnight our weather station recorded 11.7mm of rainfall which is the highest single rain event in 24 hours since 18/6/14.
Our yearly total for 2015 of  42.6mm is down half on the historical average of 83mm for the first 2 months of the year and our total of 123.9mm for the last 6 months is also down more than half on the historical average of 268mm.
Overnight rainfall data

Soaking rain on Friday
I hope this change of seasons doesn't bring the rainfall that we received in March & April of last year where we were saturated in several parts of the golf course. 


Sunday 1 March 2015

Course Update

 This week we are seeing continued progress on the greens after the renovations with good turf growth and filling in of the tyne holes. The sand has mostly disappeared and we are gradually lowering the mowing height. In fact Saturday morning we were back to 4mm height but because of the excessive leaf growth it is still a bit furry. By the end of this week we should be pretty much back to normal conditions on the putting greens.
Good turf cover after 10 days

This week we vertidrained the tees to keep the water infiltration continuing through the soil profile. We are still having warm, dry conditions so this procedure helps with getting water to where the turf needs it - the rootzone.
Vertidraining the 5th tee

We also had to make an irrigation repair to a section of old, grey PVC pipe behind the 7th green. Because it was in quite a sandy area we didn't become aware of it until Tuesday. The leaking water would go straight to ground until a big enough hole appeared in the pipe and it then showed at the surface.



Next week's weather looks like continuing the trend of warm conditions with Monday forecast to be 31degrees. There is some rain in the forecast later in the week so fingers crossed, we get a good dumping of rain to freshen things up. Because of our irrigation systems capacity, it isn't possible to get the required amount of water to the fairways during a run of very warm to hot weather. We irrigate tees and greens to their needs but have to hold back on the fairways a bit or we end up running sprinklers all morning.