UNLESS you have been living on the planet Zog, you cannot help but have noticed that the nights are drawing in.
Despite the fact that many parts of the country are still enjoying (or should that be “enduring”) unseasonably warm weather, we are now firmly into autumn and winter is just around the corner.
For many of you, it will be a time to hang up the clubs until next spring. For the rest of us it is a time to ensure that we are ready for the cold and wet days that surely lie ahead.
But I wonder how many of you are as concerned about their courses as I am.
Drought conditions have taken a terrible toll on many courses the length and breadth of the country. We saw grass turning white, we saw grass being battered by the sun, we saw grass being pulverised by golfers.
It is said that grass is incredibly resilient - and it is - but this summer’s conditions have been extreme, to say the very least. And there seems to be little sign of respite.
Astonishingly, the small amount of rain that we have witnessed has seen most of our courses starting to turn green once again.
But that is only a tiny part of the story.
While it is true that grass will recover, the reality is that many golf courses have huge patches on their fairways where there is no longer any grass to recover.
My own course is continuing to suffer and I know of many others in the region that find themselves in the same boat.
It is going to mean that huge reseeding programmes are going to have to be carried out in the weeks and months ahead.
That presents its very own set of problems.
You can’t plant grass seed unless there is moisture in the air. And how do you go about protecting the areas you are going to reseed?
Let’s be honest, if you are a greenkeeper, the last thing you are going to want is a stream of golfers pounding their feet, trolleys and buggies over newly seeded areas.
In an ideal world, these areas would be designated as “ground under repair” but the problem for many courses is that the areas in question are so large that the only real answer would be to close courses - and that is never going to happen.
I also worry that courses that have seen so little rain for months are going to be hugely susceptible to flooding when the rain finally does come along - as it surely will.
I well remember trudging through the mud in January and February this year. As I wrote at the time, it felt like some golf courses would never finally dry out. If we get the same amounts this year (and there is no reason to suspect that we will not), I fear for the effect it is going to have on our beloved courses. It could also lead to new seeds simply being washed away.
We have also seen water levels plummet. Ponds and lakes have all but dried up. Streams and river levels have tumbled. In many cases, that has produced its own set of problems.
What can we do?
I have bought myself a small fairway mat and I will be starting to use it sooner rather than later. We have had preferred lies in play for most of the summer and I figure that if we can persuade the majority of golfers to start carrying a fairway mat then it can only be a good thing. Golfshake has also looked at whether some winter golf mats are better than others and how they can help to protect courses during the colder months.
It’s an old chestnut and a real bugbear of mine but it seems pretty obvious to me that we will soon be playing approaches to wet greens, and that means pitchmarks. Lots of them. Lots and lots of them.
We have been down this road before but I am going to say it again: we should all be repairing our own pitchmarks as a matter of course and fixing any and all others that we see. It takes seconds.
Most courses will have us playing off winter tee mats. There is a very good reason for this - it gives our normal tees time to recover. Most of us hate them but they are a necessary evil.
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