Blog Elements - Turf Matters

Half Sized Blog Element (Single Author Style)

Half Sized Blog Element (Multi Author Style)

Up For The Cup At Gleneagles

September 10, 2019/in Machinery, News, Press Release/by Steve Mitchell

Up For The Cup At Gleneagles: Gleneagles will hold a unique position in golfing history when the biggest event in women’s golf concludes this weekend, by becoming the first venue in Europe to have hosted both The Solheim Cup and The Ryder Cup (in 2014). As the Gleneagles and volunteer greenkeeping teams led by golf […]

65% Water Saving From Hydroponic Tee Box

September 10, 2019/in Press Release, Technical/by Adam Lawrence

65% Water Saving From Hydroponic Tee Box: Capillary Concrete’s revolutionary new Capillary Hydroponics system is delivering outstanding results a year into its first major customer installation, at the Hawk’s Landing Golf Club in Orlando, Florida. Last September/October, Capillary Concrete built a new tee box at Hawk’s Landing, incorporating the Capillary Hydroponics system, along with superintendent Josh Kelley’s team and […]

Up For The Cup At Gleneagles

September 10, 2019/in Machinery, News, Press Release/by Steve Mitchell

65% Water Saving From Hydroponic Tee Box

September 10, 2019/in Press Release, Technical/by Adam Lawrence

Full Sized Blog Element (Big Preview Pic)

Up For The Cup At Gleneagles

September 10, 2019/in Machinery, News, Press Release/by Steve Mitchell

Up For The Cup At Gleneagles: Gleneagles will hold a unique position in golfing history when the biggest event in women’s golf concludes this weekend, by becoming the first venue in Europe to have hosted both The Solheim Cup and The Ryder Cup (in 2014).

As the Gleneagles and volunteer greenkeeping teams led by golf courses manager Craig Haldane, together with director of agronomy and estates Scott Fenwick, put the finishing touches to the Jack Nicklaus-designed PGA Centenary Course, John Deere and local dealer Double A are equally busy behind the scenes.

The greenkeeping team at Gleneagles has risen to 100 people, with tournament standard conditioning also extending to The King’s Course, which is hosting The Junior Solheim Cup, and The Queen’s Course, which remains open for member and VIP visitor play during the week.

John Deere is the official golf course and turf maintenance machinery event partner to Gleneagles for this 16th biennial edition of The Solheim Cup. The company has a long association with professional golf, having been a title sponsor on the PGA Tour, official supplier to the PGA Tour for over 25 years, official supplier to the Ladies European Tour and a partner at numerous Solheim Cup events.

In addition, John Deere is partnering Gleneagles by exclusively providing golf course maintenance machinery and ancillary equipment for use across all three championship golf courses.

“We are very grateful for the support from our local dealer Double A as we’ve been gearing up the John Deere fleet ahead of the tournament,” says Craig Haldane. “Typically we aim to maintain all three courses at a very high level all year round, but we’ve upped the ante for The Solheim Cup.

“Closing the course three weeks prior to the event has allowed it to recover from any stress and provided additional time to prepare and introduce a higher frequency of cut. By fine tuning our existing practices we’ve been able go up another level in terms of a quality cut and finish for the tournament.

“We’re also very fortunate to benefit from the extra resources and experience provided by the volunteer greenkeepers supporting our team this week. Eight of the 52 volunteers are women, who have joined our own Laura Campbell and BIGGA’s head of membership services Tracey Maddison to help with the course preparations, so it’s fitting that we can showcase the equal role women play in our industry, especially during The Solheim Cup.”

Carlos Aragones, John Deere European turf sales & marketing manager, adds: “The Solheim Cup is one of the biggest events on the 2019 sporting calendar and we are delighted to be a part of it. We are also proud of our collaboration with Gleneagles in helping to prepare the course for such a prestigious tournament.”

In 2019 John Deere and its dealers are supporting more than 10 major tournaments in the UK and Ireland, every month from the Betfred British Masters at Hillside Golf Club in May to The Solheim Cup at Gleneagles and the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth in September. This involves providing specialist support staff and more than 150 machines including walk-behind and ride-on greens mowers, tees & surrounds, fairway and rough mowers, compact tractors and Gator utility vehicles.

“Traditionally we work closely with the individual club’s course managers and greenkeeping teams to help keep all the machines in the fleet serviced and ready for work each day, and ensure all cutting units can achieve the highest possible quality of cut,” says John Deere Limited turf division manager Chris Meacock. “This partnership approach helps everyone to achieve the best possible results where they matter, out on the course, and keep things running as smoothly as possible throughout the event.”

For the latest industry news visit turfmatters.co.uk/news

Get all of the big headlines, pictures, opinions and videos on stories that matter to you.

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for fun, fresh and engaging content.

You can also find us on Facebook for more of your must-see news, features, videos and pictures from Turf Matters.

65% Water Saving From Hydroponic Tee Box

September 10, 2019/in Press Release, Technical/by Adam Lawrence

65% Water Saving From Hydroponic Tee Box: Capillary Concrete’s revolutionary new Capillary Hydroponics system is delivering outstanding results a year into its first major customer installation, at the Hawk’s Landing Golf Club in Orlando, Florida.

Last September/October, Capillary Concrete built a new tee box at Hawk’s Landing, incorporating the Capillary Hydroponics system, along with superintendent Josh Kelley’s team and contractor Double Eagle Golf Works. The system divides the tee box into two areas, with a layer of Capillary Concrete under the rootzone. Two air lift pumps, powered by a 55 watt solar panel, move water inside the closed system. All irrigation is applied subsurface; because of this, water is mainly lost through transpiration, with evaporation minimal. The system creates a moving water table, using capillary action to move water out of one zone and into another. The water pushes the heavier carbon dioxide molecules out of the rootzone and sucks in oxygen to replace them. It is a far more successful method of gas exchange in the rootzone than conventional methods of aeration.

Kelley says: “We have been working with Capillary Concrete on our bunkers since 2016, and they first mentioned the Hydroponic System to us in summer 2018. We said we were keen to try it, and so we began building the test tee in late September. It was completed and grassed in early October. Now, a typical tee box is obviously just a pile of dirt that you shape up. As you get to the higher end, you might put drainage under it, or even use a special rootzone. The process here was that we laid out the rectangular box, cored down twelve inches, and then installed two inches of Capillary Concrete before filling up with sand, levelling and sodding. It was not a difficult project.”

“It is a trial site; we aren’t doing anything special to it,” Kelley continues. “We have run no overhead irrigation at all, except to water in two applications of herbicide. The tee itself has performed superbly; zero hotspots, no disease issues, no wet areas.”

Capillary Concrete inventor and CEO Martin Sternberg CGCS, says: “We are grateful to Josh and Hawk’s Landing for the ability to test Capillary Hydroponics close to our Orlando base. When we installed the tee, we put a flow meter on the irrigation so we could measure exactly how much water was being used. After almost a year, we can say that it has used 65 per cent less water than a similar sized, conventionally irrigated tee box, and we think that we can tweak the system to get that figure to 85 per cent.”

Sternberg adds: “I started experimenting with tees five years ago in Sweden, primarily as a subsurface irrigation project. But the addition of a hydroponic moving water table – which we can do because of the strength and capillary properties of our product – is what makes this a game changer. We know we are getting up to 6,000 per cent more gas exchange in the rootzone in comparison to convention methods of aeration, and it is obvious that will have a massive impact on turf health. This is akin to what happens naturally in a seaside links environment, where you typically have a very low water table – but critically, it moves with the tide. That promotes a gas exchange. The best way to promote gas exchange is to push it with a water front – which is what we can do using Capillary Concrete. The hydroponic industry is 25-30 years ahead of us in the turfgrass industry in terms of understanding how to optimize plant root oxygen exchange, but it hasn’t been physically possible to build large outdoor structures for hydroponics without a product that performs as Capillary Concrete does. If you compare the cost of building, to use Capillary Hydronponics is slightly more expensive than building a push-up or California tee, but comparable to USGA specification construction.”

Josh Kelley says: “I really think in markets where water is scarce or expensive, this will change the way we do things in the golf business, and I’m delighted that we at Hawk’s Landing were one of the first to get to try it out.”

For the latest industry news visit turfmatters.co.uk/news

Get all of the big headlines, pictures, opinions and videos on stories that matter to you.

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for fun, fresh and engaging content.

You can also find us on Facebook for more of your must-see news, features, videos and pictures from Turf Matters.

Half Sized Blog Element (Single Author Style)

Half Sized Blog Element (Multi Author Style)

Up For The Cup At Gleneagles

65% Water Saving From Hydroponic Tee Box

Up For The Cup At Gleneagles

65% Water Saving From Hydroponic Tee Box

Full Sized Blog Element (Big Preview Pic)

Up For The Cup At Gleneagles

Up For The Cup At Gleneagles: Gleneagles will hold a unique position in golfing history when the biggest event in women’s golf concludes this weekend, by becoming the first venue in Europe to have hosted both The Solheim Cup and The Ryder Cup (in 2014).

65% Water Saving From Hydroponic Tee Box

65% Water Saving From Hydroponic Tee Box: Capillary Concrete’s revolutionary new Capillary Hydroponics system is delivering outstanding results a year into its first major customer installation, at the Hawk’s Landing Golf Club in Orlando, Florida.

RESOURCES

CONTACT

CONNECT