Your West Links Summer Months

How do you get the very best from your course? It’s simple: you get the very best for your course. And they don’t come any better than our Course Manager Kyle Cruickshank. His resumé reads like a bucket list of the golfing greats, with experience working at the likes of Muirfield, Gleneagles, Royal Melbourne and Paris National. The West Links is grateful to be in his skilled and knowledgeable hands. Here Kyle talks us through what to expect on the course over the summer months, proudly introduces some of his talented team and explains the techniques that help ensure we present you with one of the finest courses in the world.

Click to watch how we lovingly care for our beloved West Links

We are fully into the swing of the season now and, despite a tough start to the growing season, we are now in prime golfing and grass growing conditions. Although we all assume the Easter weekend is the start of the Spring, along with the ‘Augusta Syndrome’ the Masters brings every year, grass growth has been slow to kick in this year. There have been plenty of days where the team have been out in shorts showing off their pale legs, before quickly coming back to the sheds to layer up against the cold winds and low temperatures. With our experience of the past and never fully knowing what the weather will do in the future, we take each day as it comes…

In this Summer edition of Your Links we wanted to highlight the type of maintenance and management work that would normally take place during the summer months.

The summer is our main cutting season, so most of our duties naturally revolve around keeping on top of growth, maintaining a consistent and true playing surface and keeping an eye on the ground’s moisture levels.

Depending on whether we have a dry or a wet summer, the cutting regime or general conditioning can be quite different. A dry summer will provide the great firm and fast conditions that we would all expect from a links course.

A warm and wet summer, however, with the high amounts of coarser grasses we have around the site we could easily turn into a grass-growing factory and really struggle to keep on top of growth.

Our maintenance will also depend on the varying weather conditions through the days, weeks and months. We plan to aerate greens on a monthly basis to increase the oxygen levels in the soil, improve percolation of irrigation or rainwater and to help breakdown our organic matter.

If we have lush growth we may have to go out and double cut/verti-cut/brush greens to keep on top of excessive growth. A dry summer will mean we have to go out with the hand-hose to apply water to hotspots and dry areas of greens or any areas showing signs of stress. We try to be as unintrusive as possible, which is a lot easier said than done, but as part of our plans to improve the putting surfaces, it’s short-term pain for long-term gain.

We will also look to utilise some of our new equipment in areas showing signs of stress or wear and tear.

The Vredo Disc Overseeder, for example, will be utilised selectively on fairways through the summer in order to encourage a finer sward and help germinate seed in areas that are looking bare.

The Widenmann Gxi8 Aerator, meanwhile, will also target selective spots to break up any compaction and increase oxygen within the soil, as well as help in the monthly aeration on the greens along with the pro-core.

We also have our Turf Nursery redevelopment, which will utilise the JCB Mini-Digger. In the months ahead, this should also prove to be a great training ground for the team to learn how to use the machinery. The EngCon system here really is a game changer, too, and will be a great asset to undertaking the shaping works around the West Links.