At last a day with no rain

At last we managed to complete our top-dressing and drag matting in the dressing to the greens and surrounds other jobs today were changing holes, raking bunkers, top-dressing the 2nd fairway and brushing in, we were hoping all the aeration work would of been completed yesterday but the weather had other ideas, jobs yesterday as we could not work on greens were cut all tees and divot, cut semi-roughs, start cutting deep rough between holes 2 & 4 and burning the grass collected from the rough. Hopefully by 2 weeks time the greens will be fully recovered from the work

The material from one green from scarifying

9th green after scarifying two ways

Andy verti-cutting greens and surrounds after the scarifying we had to leave the greens for a couple of hours to dry before verti-cutting

Scottie out cutting and collecting the deep rough left of 8th fairway we will be planting this out with gorse to help add feature and colour to this area

the greens after being cut and over seeded we will have to wait for dry weather to apply the top-dressing

Aeration week

This week we have the course closed to carry out aeration work on greens, surrounds and tees which is solid tine greens and surrounds with a 8mm tine to a depth of 3" at 2" spacing then a double scarify, verti-cut , over seed and then top-dress the tees are getting verti-drained with a 1/2" solid tine to a depth of 6" so it's a busy week for us and it does not help when we turn up to work this morning and it's raining so that has delayed the scarifying as the soil profile being so wet, other jobs were to take off all tee furniture and take out the pins and hole cups we also top-dressed the 2nd fairway and collected balls then made a start to the scarifying after break

This week has been a busy week for us with hosting the senior home internationals from Monday to Thursday which has been a real test for the golfers with the weather we have had Wednesday and Thursday we have had to put the tee markers forward onto the yellow tees and we had to stop cutting greens yesterday so it's been fun and games, so tasks this week were to get everything cut on Monday then it's been raking bunkers, changing holes, setting up tee markers, cutting or rolling greens daily, tasks in the afternoons have been divoting tees behind the matches, divoting landing areas, collecting balls etc and working in greens turf nursery.

10th tees

Greens turf nursery

6th green

Autumn is here leaves in the bunkers at hole 3 which we are collecting and cleaning up daily now

Seniors getting to hit off turf which has given us extra tasks of divoting, cleaning up old divots and putting out balls each day

Today we were out cutting & rolling greens, strimming the boundary fence line, moved tee markers, trimmed fairway yardage disc's, collected all the balls, cut the driving range, helped the SGU putting up scoreboards etc for next week as we are hosting the senior home internationals other jobs were clean up the mess room and put on the solid tines on the corer for the end of next week

The area left of the 8th green that will be green next year which was cored and seeded 3 weeks ago, we have had a great take with the seed other jobs this week were to spray a liquid 5.0.10+10fe on the greens, spray tees with wetting agent, complete all the strimming work and cutting all the bunker faces

Today we spiked greens to a depth of 1" with a 6mm solid tine, cut and rolled behind to smooth off surface then sprayed wetting agent other jobs were move tee markers and divot, replace the flags as they are looking old and grubby, collect balls off the range and cut all the semi-roughs

Today we vibrate rolled greens as we sprayed them yesterday with a product called Jewel to help kill off any moss this was so not to remove any off the spray other jobs were to cut surrounds, cut tees, divot tees, empty tee bins then after break when it dried up we started to cut fairways and cut round fairway bunkers also we had in Eagle promotions remeasuring the course

Stan Zontek (USGA Green section), John Kaminiski (Penn State University)& Peter Deorenden
(University of Maryland) playing here at Crail as you can see they brought great weather with them today