Another week of glorious weather and I read that July 2019 is poised to be the hottest month the world has ever recorded.  The warmest July on record for Brisbane was actually last year but that also has a chance of being beaten this year.  This time last year I was in Iceland in the middle of summer and it never got above 10 degrees so at least they help keep the averages down!!

The fertiliser that was applied to the River course greens certainly got a response with quite a bit of leaf being put on them this week.  The River course was closed on Thursday afternoon to allow us unhindered access for maintenance and we took the chance to de-thatch the greens.  It is quite unusual to do this in July but we got a great result.  A lot of dead and decaying leaf matter was pulled out and the greens got a great chance to "breath".  The photo below shows some of the material removed and there is not much green coloured leaf matter in there which is just the result we were after.

Primarily dead material removed.

It is still quite cool in the shade and the northern side of any east - west running fairways are still very thin due to the shading effect of the trees.  I snapped the photo below of 11R fairway at 1.35pm on Tuesday afternoon and you can still see the wheel marks in dew even though the sun had been out all day and the temperature was in the low 20's.  Further up the fairway near the players you can see much greener fairway grass that gets much more sunlight.

Dew still on the ground @ 1.35pm.

As mentioned last week a very busy golfing schedule over the next two weeks.  The Queensland senior amateur next week for three days followed the next week by the Vets week of golf means that our access to the courses is limited and restricted primarily to course set up only on the course being used for the event.  It's all been done before though and we welcome the challenge to present the courses as good as can be to the many visiting golfers.