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At the end of September/start of October each year, the lawn undergoes a significant overhaul. It is scarified to remove the accumulation of thatch and then hollow cored (small plugs of lawn removed).
On the left we have the team of workers doing the scarifying. This involves a a large skip and a lot of wheelbarrow work as does the hollow coring.
The coring is usually 75mm deep and creates a lot of "debris". This is the scarifying machine below.
The lawn is then deep slit tined. "Tines" are knife like blades which penetrate into the soil and prune the roots.
The green is then treated with a fungicide and seed spread across the green. We typically use a Fescue/Bent Grass seed mixture, with a 20Kg bag being enough to do the entire green with some left over.
After that, a 70% sand / 30% soil top dressing material is applied to the whole green, the intent being to fill up the "holes" created by the hollow coring and slit tining. The amount of top dressing material will vary according to the depth of the hollow cores. With 50mm depth, 4 Tonne of top dressing should be enough but with a 75mm depth, its more likely that 6 Tonne would be required. Again, this is a lot of material to be ferried from lorry to green.
In recent years, the Club has used Avonmore Associates to do all this hard work because they have the manpower and the specialist machines. The Club does have some of the machinery to do these jobs but in the past, when Club members did the hard work under the guidance of our green keeper, too many people ended up with aches and pains to make the cost saving worth it.
Over winter, the greenkeeper applies appropriate materials to generate grass growth, supress weeds, keep diseases and grubs at bay, mows the lawn, verticuts and, if he's lucky, gets assistance from members with removing dew, removing mulch and the like.