I think I have written before of things not going to plan and this week we had a beauty.  I sent out a crew to look at the blocked drainage sump on the right side of 13 West green thinking that it would be a simple operation as it normally is by just simply clearing the leaves and debris.  A few hours later after some investigation we found that a tree root had grown IN the actual drainage pipe and was the cause of the drain not running.  We often pull out what we refer to as "horses tails" which are clumps of fibrous roots but I can't remember ever seeing a pipe full of one root.  So a simple clear the drain turned into quite a large scale operation including replacing the bunker drainage and associated outlets and that has left quite a bit of surface damage.  I will wait for the area to settle before it is returfed when some warmer conditions arrive.  The worrying thing is that if the root was that big in a drainage pipe, one wonders how many roots are feeding off the green!! 



Tree root growing inside the 80mm pipe.

   

More of the tree root in the pipe

What a mess!

And after some fine weather finally the courses have dried out and are both in great shape and will play very well on the week end.  All turf areas are in nearly as good a condition as they could be for this time of year.  Hopefully the weather will hold for the Vets week of golf next week.  In excess of 550 players on the courses each day makes for some busy times ahead.

The bunker question posed last week has had some interesting comments and I will endeavour to cover that topic next week.