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Over the last few years the ever increasing costs of plant nutrients, fertilisers, water rates and also the growing concern about how we are treating the environment has made us look at other ways of maintaining a healthy golf course in a way that can be effective and importantly, sustainable.
Something that we have been heavily concentrating on since January 2010 is instead of just adding nutrients to the plant to force it to grow we have been focusing on creating a good soil biology, so that the grass plant can extract all the food and supplements it needs directly from the soil as and when it requires it.
This may sound like something that the plant would do anyway, but unfortunately recent studies have shown that due to the constant use of in-organic fertilisers and chemicals over the last 50 years or so, the soil has effectively become sterile just like much of the farm land we have around us supplying our daily food. Just like farmers we are noticing that the plants can not function without this artificial help.
Since the start of 2010 we have introduced a system that monitors our mains fed irrigation water and as needed, it removes any salts, chlorides, bicarbonates and adjusts the PH to the correct rate of 5.5-6.5, effectively giving us as close to the chemical make up of rain water as possible.
We have also purchased a greens iron that means instead of having to intensively cut the greens at a far lower cutting height just to maintain a good greens speed ,we can keep the speed higher using the roller.
As I have already mentioned we are also now only using sustainable natural organic fertilisers and we have in place a program that over time will return the soil structure back to its natural form. It is hoped that as this program evolves we will be able to use less fertilisers as the plant will take all it needs from the soil, we will be able to use less water as the plant will be producing much deeper roots and we will be able to introduce more beneficial grass species into the greens giving us much less disease problems and better winter surfaces.
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