They’re back. We know the weather’s turning when we go out on the course and find those little balls of mud sitting on the top of the grass.
Wormcasts. They get everywhere on the golf course and even the greens can’t escape. The Royal Horticultural Society describes them as “small heaps of muddy soil ejected from the digestive tract of some species of earthworm”.
Gross. But they’re a nuisance to golfers and greenkeepers. They can blunt the blades on mowers, for a start, and your courses teams have largely just had to put up with them since a chemical that provided an easy fix was banned back in 2017.
Add a wet winter into the mix, and these little globs of misery can hang around a course for quite a while. And where there are plenty of them in situ, it’s likely they’re going to interfere when you’re playing a round.
So what can you do about them? Suffer in silence, or get sweeping? Are things different on the green as opposed to the fairway? Let’s get under the surface of wormcasts and figure it out…
What are the rules on wormcasts?
Wormcasts are loose impediments. The definition says worms, “and the mounds… they build”, “such as wormcasts”, fall under the rule.
That means, as set down in Rule 15.1a, you can remove them anywhere on or off the course and you can “do so in any way”. Hand, foot, club, towel, you name it and you can probably use it.
But, as I’m sure you all know, if the ball moves while you’re doing so you’ll need to add a one shot penalty. And if you forget to replace the ball and hit it from its new position, that penalty becomes two strokes.
There are caveats. If the ball moves on the green, and it’s been done accidentally, there is no penalty, and you put the ball back on its original spot.
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And on the tee, the ball is not in play until a stroke is made at it. If it’s still in the teeing area after a stroke, or after taking relief, then Rule 6.2b (6) allows you to lift or move the ball without penalty anyway.
Got a question for our expert?
Despite the changes to the Rules of Golf in 2019 and 2023, there are still some that leave us scratching our heads. I’ll try to help by featuring the best of your queries in this column.
What do you think about these rules on wormcasts and loose impediments? Let me know on X.
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