There’s no question that the Wiedenmann Super 600 that Trentham Golf Club purchased 15 months ago is proving to be its most versatile piece of kit.
The Super 600 sits at the heart of the Stoke-on-Trent-based club’s maintenance programme, tackling three key annual operations across the course: rough management, scarifying, and leaf collection.
“Even if you were to offer task-specific machines, I’d still say the Super 600 is the best at scarifying, the best at rough management, and the best at leaf collection,” said Ed Stant, course manager at the Staffordshire venue. “It’s so well engineered that I wouldn’t even think about a competitor.”
Trentham had run a Super 500 for ten years before upgrading. A Super 600 supplied by Wiedenmann dealer Turner Groundscare instantly brought increased capacity — a 4,500-litre hopper compared with the previous 2,500 litres — and the new vigour of an upgraded model, with many of the options now standard.
“Being a parkland course, our rough can get quite thick,” said Ed. “We want to encourage finer grasses, so we aim to cut and collect before nutrients go back into the soil. It’s always a balance — we don’t want the course to look too open, especially ahead of big events — so we manage it in stages.
“With flail blades on the Super 600, we’ll start in mid to late summer, taking the rough down gradually rather than topping it in one go. We might halve the height to maintain appearance and playability, then take it right down again in late August or September, just before we scarify the fairways.”
“We changeout the blades on the machine and then usually start scarifying in early autumn once the competition diary allows — typically early October — and it takes about ten to fourteen days. We have a lot of ground to cover. It results in an incredibly neat, tidy finish. Scarifying fairways is normally a once-a-year operation, but if conditions allow, we may choose to go again in spring.
“As the conditions change, we switch to leaf collection. We blow as many leaves as we can to the boundaries, but some always collect under trees. The Super 600 clears them easily, and with its high-tip facility up past two metres, we can tip onto vertical piles at our two composting areas. It’s really efficient — the piles grow taller instead of wider, so we save space.”
Trentham has another piece of Wiedenmann kit — a Terra Spike GXi8 HD deep aerator. The championship course upgraded a 14-year-old XP6 for the new model around the same time as they bought the Super 600.
“The GXi8 HD is so clean, so smooth, and so fast,” said Ed. “We use it everywhere — fairways, approaches, greens, walkways, traffic areas. I wouldn’t be without our Wiedenmanns, they’re unrivalled in what they do.”
