Kevin Munt Golf Consultant

Golf Greens - 2mm Height of Cut your USP?

After over a dozen articles on the subject, more than 200 thread posts, and in excess of 22,000 Forum page views, the issue of mowing greens as low as 2mm, on a continuous basis throughout the growing season, came to a head at the BIGGA’s BTME currently being staged in Harrogate.

Since Ealing Golf Club’s Course Manager Greg Evans went to press with this radical concept, I have not been slow in making my opinion known on this subject. So like everyone else in the 220 plus throng, who attended at 08.00 yesterday morning, I have been eagerly looking forward to this debate for sometime.

Soil the final Frontier?

Do Compost teas have a place in golf green maintenance?

There is undoubtedly a growing interest in this country in ‘growing your own’ and it is spreading to golf clubs, I am not talking about vegetables though, no I am talking about beneficial micro-organisms, The life in the soil that provides life on this planet.

I have been asked a lot lately what I think about their part in management of golf greens, so here is where I am at on the subject of bug life.

Spring Greens renovation programme (pictorial)

I have no doubt that most greenkeeping teams this side of the equator will have completed a spring renovation operation on their greens ready for the season ahead.

Most clubs in the UK now seem to have a ‘maintenance week’ set aside to accommodate major works to greens in spring and autumn.

This is true at Buckinghamshire Golf Club and Course Manager Simon Graham and his team undertook his programme in a dry warm week at the end of March (pure luck!).

Green Speed

Should they be disturbing?

Oh I just could not let this one pass! I have just read Pitchcare’s cleverly juxtaposed articles on mowing heights for golf greens.

They have got Richard Windows and Henry Bechelet of the STRI to give their views on mowing regimes in relation to the Disturbance Theory then followed it with an article by Greg Evans, the Course Manager at Ealing Golf Club (near London), in which he advocates maintaining greens at 2mm!

Journalistic genius? Well this sort of contra opinion on what is basically the management of green speed, is a delight for someone like me, and no doubt will be of interest to all golf course managers around the globe.

Are your golf greens recession proof?

Well it is now official, the UK is in a recession, it took a little while for the stats to catch up with the BBC’s self-fulfilling prophecy, their big red plummeting arrow graphic has been making my blood boil for the last three months!

So now it is here, how will an economic recession affect your golf greens and how should you manage them? Sounds stupid does it not, grass affected by a recession? Well of course in literal terms it isn’t, but in practical terms it is and in the case of playing surfaces they are. It is of course their keepers that are affected, or should I say their managers and their maintenance practices.