The reason I am talking about moisture is simple finer grasses don’t like wet soils and annual meadow grass does so for us to be changing the habitat for finer grasses will create firmer faster greens that are more tolerant and more sustainable with less water, fungicide and fertiliser needed which in the end is more cost-effective for Mortonhall. The vgr is run off our irrigation system and using high pressured water creates the hole and instantly fills with sand, for the next 7 days the moisture levels increase due to the water injected but this settles down to give firmer greens, previously our greens during the summer months have been 40% moisture and 50% in the winter now our greens are 40% through the winter after our double vgr we are numbers in the 30s. So far this spring we have completed the greens twice and injected 70 tonnes of sand into our greens, previously with the coring method that would have been 40 tonnes but I’m sure you will all agree the surfaces are so much cleaner and no need for vigorous brushing. The downside of the dryject was it couldn’t cope with any slight slopes being a pedestrian machine so this was when we started to look at alternatives, the vgr top changer is a tractor mounted machine so slopes wouldn’t be a problem and with this machine having a built-in computer it allows us to control depth, amount of sand going in and size of holes. The increased firmness was evident to see and how they coped with heavy rain, especially on one specific day of 35mm when other courses around were closed we were still on main greens. This is when we extend this process out onto our aprons and surrounds in the 2023/4 seasons.Īfter our autumn renovations with the dryject machine, there were many positives going into the winter months, being able to get the sand directly into the profile without the disruption of coring and stressing the plant with vigorous brushing to get the sand into the core holes. Going forward for the rest of the season and into our winter projects which we will post in October, we will be doing another vgr but with good recovery our members will enjoy good greens throughout the winter that can cope better from Mother Nature, that will be our starting point for next season when we will start to get to the point that our greens require less renovation work and more controlling with light dressing that our members won’t know we have even done this. The frustration for the team this past summer is the slight blemishes on the greens which is called superficial this is caused by too much water being applied I’m sure you can understand through the dry spells this level of water being added to the plant must be right and our moisture levels were on the higher side of perfect for this to form, with a little oxygen from aeration this will not be a problem. ![]() Finer grasses thrive on less inputs of water, fertiliser and fungicides. We all know when poa seeds every spring but this year with the dry summer it seems to have continued to seed for much longer basically the plant defensive mechanism kicking in our goal is to reduce how much poa we have in our greens and increase finer grasses such as bent, we will be going through a drying period on our greens this is the soil profile where we want to see numbers in the 20s when we test for moisture again higher promotes disease. With reducing the organic matter to a manageable percentage we have reduced the inputs and of course the cost this year we will be £3000 on fungicide and look to keep reducing that number, on Nitrogen I forecast to end the year on 150 and again we will reduce that year on year that’s also a saving £2000. With the investment into the vgr top changer we have already seen the benefits of less disruption to the membership and getting the sand to where we want it in the profile without stress on the plant with continuously brushing, I’m sure you will all agree that the greens have been better earlier this season and this was very much the goal to extend the playing season but still doing the work needed. His year we have starting to reap the rewards for the work we have done over the last few seasons, when we started this process our organic matter was sitting at 12 %, spongy surfaces hungry for feed and very prone to disease this wasn’t cost affective at all on a yearly basis we were spending between 6-7 thousand pounds on fungicide and putting over 240N onto our greens costing 4-5 thousand pounds ,our organic matter now sits at 5-6 %.
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