The British weather never goes away and this year a drought may bring different challenges, writes Ganton course manager Simon Olver
The unpredictability of the British weather has been on full show again and having battled an incredibly wet 2024, we’ve been faced with a very dry start to 2025.
While the conditions have been good for golf so far, with fairways playing firm and running fast, greenkeepers are already having to deal with the effects of the dry spell.
From Apr 1-May 20 in 2024 we had 129.6mm of rainfall at Ganton. In 2025, we had 10.2mm – and just 1mm in the first three weeks of May. It is already very dry on the golf course and, in short, the current state of play is concerning.
While it has been dry, we’re also still getting cold nights, meaning growth hasn’t kicked into full flow. While the courses are turning brown, growth rates are still slow which means areas haven’t repaired that normally would have by the time the ground dries out. There is one positive though – low growth means the rough will be less thick this year.
Moisture levels were holding on through April, but the reserves in the ground have now all but gone and we’re seeing the change in playing surfaces speed up – particularly areas which aren’t irrigated. Even with some rain, levels will not be replenished quickly.
Furthermore, evapotranspiration – the rate at which water moves from the surface into the atmosphere – is high. The ET rate was sitting at 130.8 in May and we were simply unable to recover anything like the 60-70% we’d want to through irrigation and rainfall.
With dry conditions comes increased stress on the plants. Over time, without moisture grass species will move into dormancy and ultimately die. Seedhead pressure is also high in meadowgrass right now – even with products to reduce this. This will last longer this year due to high stress levels.
We’ve also had limited or no time to apply fertilisers as growth potential hadn’t picked up enough for these products to be effective before it became too dry to use them. This will have a knock-on effect later this year as the plant will be weaker than we would have wanted.
Water and how we conserve and use it is a major concern as well. At Ganton, we’re collecting moisture data from the greens twice per day and focusing on hand watering to control levels rather than utilising the full irrigation system. This approach, while time consuming, is allowing us to reduce our water consumption by up to 75% compared to a full run of irrigation – conserving the limited amount of water we can apply due to licensing and limited availability.
So what happens when it does rain? As the plants move into dormancy and potentially die, any water which comes will kick living plants back into growing, creating inconsistency been living and dead areas. When the moisture is replenished, dead areas will need to be repaired, which may lead to increased levels of maintenance in the autumn and winter.
With the pressure of extreme conditions comes increased pressure on greenkeepers too. We know what happens to golf courses during a drought, and while we want dry weather to give us firm playing conditions and what I think of as a proper English summer of golf, we don’t want to see grass dying because it has been completely starved of moisture.
Having had too much rain and massive downpours in the last two years, we have had the opposite so far this year, and it is equally concerning. Greenkeepers want to see courses performing their best and right now the focus is on being efficient with the water we have, being active in monitoring all areas and dealing with issues that we can deal with, and preparing for when the rain does come.
