Member News
General Manager Report Stephen Norton
What a difference a month can make. When I wrote the last newsletter the course was looking lovely and green and now just a few weeks on we are parched due to the recent weather. Neil and his team are working incredibly hard on keeping all the tees, approaches and greens as well watered and fed as possible however with so little rain on the forecast this a significant job for them all. 2022 is the driest start to the year we have had in over 10 years and we have had just half the rainfall we did in the first 6 months of 2021.Neil has gone into some good detail about the irrigation system in this month’s report which we hope you will find interesting. He wrote this a few weeks ago, clearly knowing what we were due to face. In September we are hosting another members night on our driving range so we wanted to give you as much notice as possible to book for this, with free balls, free food and some prizes up for grabs, it is not to be missed. I have recently returned from my own golfing trip up to Scotland. Me and a friend went on a road trip to my in-law's house to go and watch the Open on the Thursday. Along the way we played Silloth on Solway, a fantastic tight links course, we also played Drumoig up in Fife, and we played 2 of the 12 oldest clubs in the world, Burntisland and Crail. Crail has to be the most picturesque course I have ever played with the sea in view on all 18 holes and several tee shots requiring you to hit OVER the sea. Thankfully my golf was in far better form than my recent outings and I got to enjoy a few good shots out there. Watching so many of the top golfers at the Open was a real treat and something I thoroughly enjoyed.
Membership Renewals Thank you to everyone who has renewed this year, the vouchers for those who renewed on 1st July will be sent out in August.
Course Manager Report Neil Crittenden,
With some long hot periods in June, you will notice that the course becomes dry very quickly. Here at Birchwood, we have a fantastic free draining course allowing all year playability especially in the winter months. During the summer months because it’s so free draining the course becomes dry quite quickly. The greens, tees and approaches all remain in good condition as the irrigation System goes into overdrive. This month I thought I’d give you an overview of this important tool that becomes a lifeline to those areas.
Its workings are a mystery to most golfers, but our course wouldn’t survive without an effective irrigation system. Ask most people about how an irrigation system works, most might be able to say about the sprinklers around the greens tees etc but that would be about it. Without an irrigation system our greens, approaches and tees would look very different during the summer months. It’s basically a tool for delivering water to turf to keep it alive. That’s it in a nutshell.
We take water from our reservoir which is situated between the 10th and 11th holes and pump it in a controlled fashion to our greens, tees and approaches which we call stations. This works as follows, first we start at the reservoir, this is basically a huge holding tank which is filled up with rainwater over the winter and topped up with a borehole. Within this is a transfer pump which transfers the water from there to our pump supply tank which is located next to our sheds and is automatically fed on demand. From the holding tank we have Two pumps and mains pipework that runs around the course supplying the network of minor pipes. If you can imagine it looks like a road map under the course. You have the main pipework, which will take the water out to near to a green (station), and then you’ll have a set of valves and taps to then divert that around the turf surface and the sprinklers to deliver it. With the mains pipework, we have a cable that at one end is attached to the computer in my office and at the other end to all the taps and valves for the stations of which we have 86. Our irrigation system with its software does all sorts of things to optimise the performance of the system. It will calculate the most efficient run pattern will look at the hydraulics of the system and consider where the greatest pressure is and will work out the most efficient way of optimising this. Our system has variable speed pumps, and they detect where there is a pressure loss and rectify.
Water is one of the critical elements for any living thing. We need air, light, food and water. A grass plant is the same, so an irrigation system basically delivers that water to the grass plant that it needs to keep alive. You can use water in several ways to affect the characteristics of the playing surface of a Green. But most importantly it’s about getting the right level of moisture in the soil for healthy turf. Other components for that include drainage and soil make up. You need to understand and control it sufficiently to reach the goal of the ideal soil moisture content. First, it’s knowing when and where water is required, there is a complex set of calculations done to work that out but in layman’s terms whatever moisture is lost we replace. We know exactly what our sprinklers can delivered (however many millilitres of water per min). We then look at what our moisture loss is through Evaporation (from the soil) and Transpiration (from the grass plant) which is known as Evapotranspiration, known as the ‘ET rate. Basically, without going into it to deeply Evapotranspiration is the water lost from the soil and from the grass plant itself. You know how much water has been lost through evaporation, because you know how much moisture there is within the soil, and you can physically look at a grass plant and can calculate how much water it probably lost. The evapotranspiration rate is measured normally in millimetres over time. Say our ET loss was six millimetres. We know then what we to put down and how long to switch the sprinklers on for because we know how much water they are going to deliver.
All I’m trying to do is keep the soil moisture content consistent and for me it might be 25 per cent volumetric moisture content. So, if you take a piece of soil – a cubic metre – the amount of moisture in it, air space and roots, should be 25 per cent. That’s where our greens would be happy. During the Summer months the System needs constant attention whether it is breaks in pipes, electrical problems or just adjusting sprinkler heads and we usually have at least one Greenkeeper keeping an eye on things. The Irrigation system on the course is one of the most important Tools that we have and probably the most expensive tool that we use. Just to give you an idea of how much water we use, if say we put down 2mm of water on all greens, tees and approaches in one night (2mm is a shower when it rains) we use 109 cubic meters. The average household with 4 people living there use 160 cubic
meters a year, so we can use a years’ worth of water for a house in just one night if conditions are right. Therefore, we outlay the cost of reservoirs and bore holes as the price of mains water would be huge and non-sustainable.
Whilst the irrigation and watering take up most of my time and brain space, we have also been doing various tree works around the course to tidy areas up and one is on the Orchard course on the 4th, it had become so overgrown you couldn’t even see the Green. See below for the before and after.
An update from Head PGA Professional Stephen Lee
YONEX DEMO DAY - Thursday 28th July We still have spaces left for our upcoming Yonex Demo Day next Thursday. Feel free to call the Pro Shop and book a slot to see what the latest technology can do for your game.
MEMBERS ONLY PRO SHOP OFFER We currently have a great offer on ALL Oscar Jacobson Polo Shirts in the Pro Shop. They’ve all been reduced to £34.99 each which is a saving of between £20£30 per shirt. As a member you will get a further 10% off if you quote ‘NEWSLETTER’ at the till point.
RE-GRIPPING You may or may not be aware that we offer a Re-Gripping service in the Pro Shop. If you feel that your club is slipping from your hands when you swing or you just want a thicker grip to help your putting stroke, Lloyd and the team have a whole range of grips in stock that can usually be done in 24-48 hours.Grips start from as little as £5 each fitting is included free within all of the prices of the grips.Or simply pop into the pro shop and get your hand measured to check if you are using the right size grip on your golf clubs.
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