Let’s be honest, we turn up and expect excellence. Every club golfer wants the greens to be as good as they can be and, sometimes, we’re not shy in expressing our views if we perceive them to be different.
But how many of us have stopped to think how those putting surfaces were produced? What goes into preparing them and keeping them in the best possible condition? How are golf greens maintained?
For Your Course, produced by the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association, we spoke to three course managers from across the UK to understand how they overcome common problems that arise on golf courses during winter.
This week, we’re asking about daily greens maintenance and how greenkeepers go about setting the heights of their putting surfaces.
Tackling those questions are greenkeeping veteran Andrew Laing; Caroline Munro, head greenkeeper at Bonar Bridge and Ardgay; and Rob Sandilands, course manager at Formby Ladies.
Greens maintenance: What do you do daily to prepare your greens?
Andrew: It varies with the time of year. During the summer, we would be cutting pretty much every day throughout the growing season.
From April certainly until the end of October, I’d expect to be mowing every day – potentially alternating with rolling if we were in a period of lower growth. During the winter months, we’d remove the dew every day using a variety of tools – whether that be a brush or cane, whip and pole, and that helps to reduce the risk of disease by keeping the surfaces drier.
At the back end of every year, every season, we have a comprehensive soil test done. That gives a range of criteria to look at – water infiltration rates, organic matter content and available nutrients.
From that, we can devise a plan for the autumn as to what type of aeration and renovation work we need to do and how severe that will need to be. I always base the work we schedule on the results of the soil test.
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Rob: Wintertime prep would be removing the dew, removing any wormcasts and any debris like that – we’ve got quite a few pine trees on site.
We have a team of four-and-a-half so, realistically, daily data collection is not something that’s achievable for us but we would do it periodically – once every week or two – particularly in the summer if we were having times of dryness.
In that period, we’re mowing every day and we roll once a week as well. We are cutting grass near enough year-round, compared to just a few years ago, and we’re doing so much more work on course prep.
Caroline: I switch and cut, basically. That’s it. When I cut them, I use the clock so they are on a different angle every day. The perimeter cut is anticlockwise and clockwise. I’ve got a John Deere 2500B and those units are offset. It means when you’re cutting the perimeter, the tyre marks aren’t going on the same route.
Every second day the tyres are on a different route and so you don’t get the tyre mark on your perimeter cut. It’s about two hours of switching and cutting.
Greens maintenance: How do you set your height of cut and what does that mean for your course?
Caroline: They are up at 5mm for the winter. We just cut once a week and then slowly bring them down. I never go lower than 4mm – just because I feed mine granular and I only recently got a sprayer that works.
I go for grass coverage and them not being quite as quick but running true. I can’t put the hours into maintaining a green that 3mm would require. I haven’t got the budget for the inputs that would need to go into maintaining that.
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Andrew: The lowest I would go to in any given year is 3.75mm and that’s during the summer months. Through the winter, we come up to 4.5mm and that’s to give the plant a little bit of extra protection through those colder months when there is less growth.
Some guys might bring the height of cut up to maybe 6mm during the winter but I like to keep a little more consistency. We don’t go excessively low in the summer and we don’t go excessively high through the winter.
Rob: It varies depending on the time of year and grass species. We’d be around 4.5mm in the summer and 5-5.5mm in the winter.
That gives us a good balance, with the amount of fine grass we’ve got, to achieve a sensible speed for daily play. If we needed to lean on it with some rolling, we could still manage to get a reasonable speed for an external tournament.
- This article appears in Your Course, the twice-yearly publication from the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association. Your Course invites golfers to gain a deeper appreciation of what preparing and maintaining a golf course really involves. Head to www.bigga.org.uk to find out more.
Now have your say
Did you realise how much work goes into greens maintenance? What do you think about these comments on height of cut? Let us know by leaving a comment on X.
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