Below picture shows a typical green on the Priors on Monday, these brown areas are completely hydrophobic and as dry as dust.  Rather than a lack of water it's actually to much thatch which is drying the soil unevenly and causing this problem.

Dry patch

 Short term and as you can see from pictures lower down we have aerated with small 8mm tines to improve penetration and watered with a wetting agent which will re-wet bone dry soil.

8mm solid tines on Priors greens

Next week the Abbotts will get these mini-tines across them and this will keep the surfaces from crusting over.   This weather puts an enormous strain on the Abbotts system, so we will be reducing water on tees over the weekend in order to concentrate on greens.

BBQ area tidied up

Through August we will be beginning our Autumn renovations (I know don't say it),  fairways are being hit first whilst still very dry and dusty.  We are bringing a scarifier in to pull out some of the weak lateral growth and clean up the fairways, together with adding grooves into the surface, this along with a herbicide treatment on some of the fairways to remove the horrible stalky rye grass i.e 8th, 9th, 10th Abbotts.  In the few weeks this takes to have an effect we will seed into the grooves we have created.  All of this will be timed, we hope to coincide with the end of summer rains so the seed can successfully germinate.  The pictures below give you an idea of the machine used and the immediate 'look' of the fairway.  This was done in October which is why we are moving scarifying forward to a dryer period, giving us a better finish

Scarifing 18th fairway

Lots of lateral growth

Clearing