Last week I went to visit Brian at Elie GC to wish him well on his retirement after nearly 51 years of service at the club. At Crail we have been busy hollow coring certain surrounds on the Balcomie course

Cutting and collecting the deep rough is still on going when weather permits, this week we are completing all strimming and flymo work to allow us to mini core and top-dress the Craighead greens and surrounds next week then the following week will see us start our winter work programs ie drainage, aeration and bunker rebuilding etc. another job we are starting is to cut and pull out the brambles that have taken over an old dyke rear of the 16th green on the Craighead course, an issue we are having at present with the high tides and rough seas is Seagulls coming onto the courses and making a mess with their feathers and droppings which are scorching the grass

 After the high winds Sunday night through to Monday we had a couple of pins broken

 The Balcomie greens getting their first cut & vibrate roll after the aeration work last week plus it did help all the rain last weekend to wash in the top-dressing

 It's that time of year again when we start to get high tides but luckily we only had a few areas to clean up the seaweed which got washed up

 Our seasonal Andrew helping clean up the seaweed at the 5th fairway on his last week of working with us

On Wednesday we applied our Autumn/winter feed (5.5.10+5fe) to the Balcomie greens & surrounds which should aid recovery from the aeration work plus keep them ticking over through the winter months

 We had visiting Sheep on the Course at the weekend

 In the last week we have started to get problems with Seagulls on certain greens on the Balcomie course, the mower cleans up the greens well but will have to wait and see the damage from their droppings

 Monday late afternoon was the start of our aeration program to the Balcomie course greens & surrounds. the process was to deep verti-drain, double mini-core, double verti-cut, cut, double turf iron, over seed, top-dress, rub in then vibrate roll

 Certain greens were also hollow cored with a 12mm tine to help take out even more thatch etc

 the 15th green being double mini-cored

 the first of 2 applications of top-dressing, so fingers crossed we complete all these tasks before the forecast rain on Friday

after the greens were deep verti-drained we carried on with this process on all the Balcomie course tees