Course Report, Written by Ryan Hammond

Dear members

The beginning of 2024 has seen a continuation of cooler, wetter and more humid conditions than we would be used to seeing for the middle of summer which overall has seen 120mm of rainfall since Christmas eve. Such weather has provided both positive and negative impacts on the course with the overwhelming positive being very little need for irrigation and all areas of the course continuing to grow vibrantly. When wet and humid conditions are present there is often a spike in disease pressure and we have seen disease not only in the greens but on many other of the short grass playing surfaces over the past few weeks due to the wet conditions but this has been mostly visual and not damaging the turf.

With more typical summer weather on the horizon I would expect to see water usage start to increase but we find ourselves in a great position with the earlier rain to have pristine conditions in for the entirety of the summer period.

GREENS

Although we have been fighting some disease issues in the greens for the past few weeks it has barely been noticeable to the naked eye and has not affected the ball roll at all. On the whole the greens have continued to perform extremely well and with such a challenging period of weather I’m delighted with how they have withstood such adverse conditions. Although they are a little softer than I would ideally like there is little you can do with so much rainfall but their improved draining capacity has allowed the surface to stay very true even with their softer surface.

We continue to keep up well with our cultural practices with another verti drain and topdress occurring just before Christmas and we will look to do this one more time prior to Club Championships starting in early February. Making this a more routine practice is already showing some positive results with the root depth being as deep as I’ve seen at Drouin which is a massive reason why our greens have held up so well in poorer than normal conditions.

FAIRWAYS/TEES/SURROUNDS

With grass growing conditions being ideal keeping up with the excessive growth has been our biggest hurdle over the past month. An application of growth regulator on all the main playing surfaces in the first week of Jan helped manage this but with some very heavy falls of rain the impact on this product didn’t get the longevity out of it that we would have hoped for.

With a good mix of rain and mild weather this has allowed both warm season and cool season grasses to flourish which has had a really positive impact of all of the short grass playing surfaces around the course. It is normally this time of year when we begin to see some of our cool season tees and surrounds start to struggle from dry and hot conditions but we are yet to see the impacts of that this year. With the weather unlikely to get too much warmer from now on we are hopeful to see these great course conditions continue well into the back end of summer.

We have steadily chipped away at spot spraying the paspalum on the short grass surfaces which is also proving to have good results. This task is a timely one being such a large property and we will be likely continuing on with these applications for several more weeks to come. Paspalum is a nightmare to control with very little products being able to kill paspalum without damaging the other desired grass species around it so a great deal of care has to be taken to ensure only the paspalum plant is being sprayed.

ROUGH

Most of the rough has now been sprayed out around the course for the purpose of both minimising cutting time and to knock the many unwanted weeds that grow in these areas. We will endeavour to finish the last few holes of this within the next couple of weeks.

Ryan Hammond

DG&CC Course Superintenden