Much of this week was spent preparing for the River green renovation that starts next week, including machinery preparation and an application of fertiliser to the greens to get them moving.  If ever you needed convincing that renovating greens is necessary then you need look no further than the turnaround on 2R green which has been remarkable to say the least.  Temperatures aren't still where I would like them to be, especially to renovate, although I sat on the motorbike seat on Thursday and it was almost too hot to sit on which is a first for the season and at 5am Friday morning we topped 20 degrees in the compound for the first time this season so hopefully we are on the move upward.

The forecast doesn't look good for next week so the renovation won't actually be fully planned out until Monday morning when we get a feel for what the weather will be bring for the week.  It will be a very different renovation from past years with the many shaded greens not being scarified or de-thatched as they are just still too weak.  All greens will be hollow tine aerated and a range of soil amendments applied to replace what has been leached out of the soil profile by the constant rainfall.   If time / weather permits the greens collars will be scarified as well.

Thoughts are with pretty much the southern half of Australia who are currently dealing with floods and if you look at the actual rainfall figures they haven't been too high (compared to what we get) but the ground just can't take any more.  At Yarrawonga & Border GC they have been ''waiting'' to flood as water will be released from dams upstream and the flood plains will go under.  Most of the courses on the Yarra River in Melbourne are under with parts of Kew GC four metres under. Also thinking of those in the USA with the devastating effects of Hurricane Ian on communities and golf courses with some 1200 golf courses suffering some damage from Hurricane related weather.  That works out to be nearly 8% of the US market and there are still courses closed now.

I have had a few readers ask about the ''worm farmers'' that I mentioned last week.  Well they were a contracting company that provided mowing services to clubs and proposed to collect ALL the clippings and compost them to create a worm farm and then extract some liquid fertiliser from the process.  They were doomed to fail here because I think they obviously underestimated the growth rates that we can experience and one of the photos below shows their ''fleet'' of mowers that were supposedly going to mow the entire property apart from greens, tees and green surrounds.  The fleet consisted of just two five gang fairway mowers, one seventy two inch outfront rough mower and one sixty inch mid mount tractor rough mower.  The other photos show some of the resultant ''mowing'' that they were able to achieve.

The four strong ''fleet''.

   

9R fairway looking back down the fairway.

9R front of the green.

 

8R fairway on the dogleg.