After some very busy weeks throughout June with 3 big events, several gun starts and club tournaments, it is now time to breathe a little and make room on the course for maintenance work and not just mowing and trimming. But not for too long, because we need to get the course safely through July so that it is in top shape for the Danish Stroke Play Championship in the first week of August.
We have quickly gone from a lovely green to a beginning drought-stricken course. Last summer haunts the back of my mind, but it is quite natural for the grass to turn yellow and go dormant in the summer. We take care of the areas around the greens and bunkers that are not affected by our irrigation system with hand watering.
The first week (27) of July offers aeration of our greens. Our greens need air down to the roots so they can continue to handle the pressure from both play and maintenance. A side effect is that the greens will temporarily become slightly softer and more receptive to play.
We aerate the greens with very small spears that barely show or disturb the playing surface. As a safety precaution, we tumble the greens to ensure evenness. The work is carried out on Monday and Tuesday mornings.
At the end of the week, the weather forecasters are promising a long-awaited rain shower, and we will take advantage of this to fertilize our fairways and semi-rough. The fertilizer will provide strength and color so that the fairways can better withstand the summer heat.
Week 28 will probably feature top dressing of greens on Monday, but this task depends a lot on the weather conditions. If it is very hot and the stress level is high, we will wait until week 30.
In week 30, the warm-up for the Danish Championship starts with work on the greens and in the bunkers. The bunker edges are trimmed and the sand is re-graded. The greens are vertically cut and top-dressed.
We look after our 90-year-old greens all year round. Our focus is to create greens that are even and fast, that can be played on all year round, based on care without the use of pesticides. This care means that we can sometimes have greens that look “mottled” and that different grass species stick out, including the long runners we see on the greens right now. The greens are still fast and the ball roll is marginally affected. We also have fixed greens. This is a derivative effect of our grass selection and top dressing program. A common thread in our care is to disturb the grass surface as little as possible and to favor our preferred grass species, red fescue, using minimal input of water and nutrients. This is not an aggressive and fast form of greenkeeping, but a very slow process. It also ensures that we can comply with the conditions for operating the golf course in Dyrehaven’s protected and unique nature.