Phoenix Golf Club

Almost following on from my last blog post with this one so please switch off if your tired already, I won’t be offended!.  The C:N is the amount of soil organic carbon (SOC) to nitrogen ratio in the soil. SOC is not to be confused purely with thatch levels, there is good organic matter (OM) and bad OM. The C:N ratio is all about carbon and nitrogen cycling through the natural means of the soil microbial. Getting the C:N balance to a higher ratio and stabilising the relationship between the SOC and the soil biology is paramount and will reap rewards in the soil by giving the soil microbial the food and environment it likes to thrive. The little greenkeepers will do a lot of the work keeping the thatch levels to a sensible level without the need to pull cores, thus not disturbing the biology more and keeping the symbiosis between plant and soil saving a few quid on the feeding programme which is essential with rising costs. From an environmental perspective pulling cores is releasing ca

It’s been a while since I posted a blog and that’s partly because of a busy schedule both at home and at work these days. So you may be wondering why I’ve aerated our greens and no longer pull out messy cores. The answer is a relatively simple one and it all revolves around management techniques. There’s more than one way to skin a cat and some manage their surfaces with high nitrogen feed and higher irrigation volumes to produce greens that recover well from damage and look nice and green throughout the season, others manage their surfaces with less nitrogen feed and less water that requires less of some other inputs to produce firm greens that putt well. The science behind those techniques is a simple one too. When turf grasses grow they produce thatch or Organic matter (OM), the faster they grow the faster the OM produces. We greenkeepers and groundsman force grass to grow sometimes by adding nitrogen feeds and we can also control growth by water inputs and plant growth regulators (

 As you are probably aware the golf course is slow to recover from winter. We have a few winter bare areas from traffic in wet conditions, the tees are still showing wear from play back of last year and most importantly the greens still showing the winter colour and are not growing much to aid any recovery. This year since the wet weather retreated in January we was hit with a barrage of snow and ice for a month in February/March and now April is the driest coldest month on record. We have currently recorded 21 frosts in April alone. The  cold night temperatures are fooling the grass into thinking we are still in winter. Plants need to take the suns energy and convert C02 and water into sugars and oxygen essentially and a lot of this process happens at night when the plant has collected maximum energy from the sun. When you have half decent day temperatures but freezing by night this process stops or slows down. We plant growers use something called growing degree days (GDD) to see whe