Not  a very easy week and luckily not in the growing season.  Two staff members were on annual leave this week which is a great time for them to take leave but then two others have been off sick all week and two others have had four days off each sick as well so we were well and truly decimated.  Although despite being short we did get the time to get the greens on both courses solid tine aerated which allows them to breathe and were also able to get greens on both courses fertilised with some granular fertiliser applied to selected (shaded) River course greens so it was a mini renovation of sorts for both courses with no disruption to play.  The videos below show the aeration taking place and the nil effect on ball roll immediately following the machine and a slo mo to show you just how hard the machine works.

 

I mentioned in the last post that I was attending the Australian Turfgrass Conference in Adelaide last week which I did and if you think the mornings are cold here then probably best not to venture to Adelaide as it's like ice in the mornings there and stays that way for the bulk of the day.  I did get to chair two five hour workshops as mentioned on Poa annua resistance and management and also one on winter diseases of couchgrass greens which were both really informative and each one had a professor from an American University present as well as some of Australia's leading turf researchers.  In the end after looking for answers I came away with more questions which is a bit frustrating but pretty normal for me.  Most of the Poa control trials and research have been done on fairway height turf with no one prepared to potentially sacrifice a green so it will be ongoing trials for me as well, particularly on 5 and 6 West as well as the Tif practice green where just about nothing touches the Poa.
 
One of the presenters is based in South Australia and is currently investigating two of our resistant varieties and trialing two new products on them so it was great to catch up with him and see the trials firsthand.  It won't be a fast process and even though they are three weeks into the trial there is very little to see.  The disease control was also interesting and pretty much endorsed the programs that we are running here that have had such good success over the past several years.  We do have quite a bit of the disease in fairways, particularly 9R for example but the cost to treat fairways is just too high.  Some new chemistry is on the horizon that will slowly make its way to Australia to give us another tool in our arsenal which will be good.  Speaking of new chemistry I was lucky enough to visit Syngenta's head office in Basel Switzerland a few years back and it was amazing to say the least.  They are continually trialing new compounds to create new products and in the 1960's 1 in 11,000 of these trials would make it to market compared with 1 in 140,000 now and they didn't mention the cost of this research but it's huge. And an interesting tidbit from their HQ is that Basel is located right on the border of Germany, France and Switzerland and their workforce of more than three hundred and fifty comes from the three different countries.  This means that they have three separate sittings for lunch in the staff canteen to accommodate the three different cuisines!!

Hopefully we will have all hands back on deck next week so we can continue some of the tree pruning we have been doing around the cart path areas over the past month or so and we will also start some root pruning along the side of selected fairways where we are pretty sure there are no underground services.  We will also be continuing to top up bunker sand where needed over the coming weeks.