Week commencing 16th May- The grass is starting to grow.... fast!!

The rain at the weekend, mixed with the sun we had last week, was a welcome mix for the course. This ensured that the grass really started to grow. I could see this clearly throughout the week.

My week started with changing holes on the Allander with Scott and Gordon along with raking the bunkers.

Now is a good chance to explain how you change a hole. Firstly, you need to decide where you are going to put the new hole. You look for a flat piece of the green, a spot of healthy grass, somewhere that hasn't had a hole recently and  somewhere not too close to the edge of the green. A hole changer is used which is a metal cylinder with a handle at the top. Two half circle shaped cylinders are hammered down into the ground then you twist the handle, pull up on the handle and a cylinder shaped tube of ground is brought up and a new hole formed. A board is used to stand on which prevents the new hole crowning and making it raised which would make it harder to putt the ball in.
( see picture below of equipment used excluding the mallet)

Next you go to the old hole and take the hole cup out using a tool that locks onto the bottom of the cup and then you are able to lift it out of the ground. Following this you would put in the tube of turf/soil you have lifted out the new hole into the old one and you ensure that it is level with the ground and within a few days the hole will be very hard to detect as it blends into the rest of the green.

Finally, you put the hole cup into the new hole and lower it down using a tool, with a heavy metal end (seen in the picture above) until the cup is roughly an inch from the top of the hole and that's it.

There are a couple of reasons for moving holes, firstly it makes the course more interesting to golfers by varying the pin positions and it also gives the ground around the hole time to recover from the increased activity over it.

On Wednesday, I, along with Gordon and Tish flymoed the grass around the burns, bunkers and tees. This is a task that generally happens once a week in the summer. Normally two people will flymo the areas while the third person will use a blower to direct the grass cuttings into certain areas. When cutting around the burns the grass clippings will be directed into the water which then gets washed away.

When we are cutting around the bunkers grass ends up in the sand, so the blower is used to get this out  and generally dispersed or blown into the out of bounds areas. The theory is to blow the grass out of the bunkers but in reality this is not always easy. If there is a slight wind, then the grass and some sand will inevitably end up on you! In your hair, face and eyes. It is a technique I have not mastered yet.

On Thursday I went around both courses changing the bins and filling up the divot boxes with a mixture of divot sand and grass seeds. Then in the afternoon I went around the Hilton picking up piles of branches that I had made earlier in the week.

Lastly, Friday was the day that I had to have my skates on. Graeme and Gordon were on a couple of cutting machines cutting the strip of grass around the green and the grass leading up to the green along with the grass on the tees. My job was to switch behind them dispersing any clumps of grass left there (see picture below). Usually one person will trim a tee while the other does the area around a green then leapfrog each other around the course (not literally) and I would follow behind. This way I know which tees and greens have been done. It becomes a bit more frantic when they decide to split up and I have to rush around the whole of the Allander switching but I managed to cover all the holes and caught them up on the Hilton. 

Here are a couple of nice pictures of the Bluebells that have sprung up in the last couple of week on a banking beside the second on the Hilton, if you hook your ball this way (which I would definitely do) go and have a look, it's very impressive.