Water management at Golf d'Hardelot
The environment is at the heart of all Resonance Golf Collection golf courses. The impact of phytosanitary products on fauna and subsoil, the increasing scarcity of water and the cost of energy are all taken into account on a daily basis in order to reconcile respect for the environment with sustainability.
Les actions mises en place pour la préservation de l'eau
Actions taken to preserve water
The Golf d’Hardelot is unique in that it offers two courses that are very similar but very different in terms of maintenance. However, both are subject to the same complexities when it comes to watering: the wind. There’s always a breeze, which dries out the course quickly. The ranges of some sprinklers are affected, so you have to be very careful. This is especially true on the Dunes course, which, as its name suggests, is built on very sandy ground that drains very quickly. If you miss a watering, it can quickly become complicated because the subsoil is very poor. In contrast, the Pins subsoil is richer and retains moisture better overall.
We use hydrometric probes on both courses to monitor soil moisture levels on a daily basis. The idea is to water just enough to keep the plants alive and therefore save as much water as possible. This is all the more important given that since 1999, the Pins course has been restricted to 50,000m3 per year by a very specific prefectoral decree. This constraint forces us to really tighten up watering and to be as efficient as possible. Over the last three years, we’ve carried out a lot of work and invested no less than €400,000 to reduce the range of sprinklers, rework the watering system and concentrate exclusively on the playing surfaces. We’ve really managed to save water while keeping the course in excellent condition.
In the summer of 2022, during the drought, we couldn’t miss a single night’s watering. We’d turn up at 4 a.m. and check that everything had been watered in the right quantity, because by early morning it all had to be finished. Gardeners would go out during the night to water with a hose to ensure maximum precision. But they didn’t all have to water at the same time, because the pumping station couldn’t keep up with the pace. In the evening, after the usual day’s work, we cut back for 2 hours and came back again to water. All this for a month and a half. Of course, all these efforts to work in a virtuous way have a cost for the golf course. All the hours at night and all the days at the weekend were astronomical sums. But the result was visible and some people thought we’d cheated… But we’d just worked twice as hard. When the others were sleeping, we were out on the course. We’re also lucky to have owners who supported us financially to maintain the quality. It’s at critical times like these that the values shared by all the golf courses in the Resonance Golf Collection group really come into their own.
Mechanical operations are constant on the Hardelot courses. Every week we sand the greens very finely so as not to interfere with play, but to work the subsoil regularly. We aerate the greens every fortnight with small spikes. At the start of the season and at the end of the summer, we drill deeper, at around 20cm, to allow the roots to grow ever deeper. During these intense periods, we spread no less than 90 tonnes of sand over the holes, and for just over two years now we’ve also been aerating the fairways. The aim is to break up this under layer, to decompact the sand in the subsoil, because contrary to popular belief it can become too dense and no longer let anything through if we don’t take action. Nobody had done it before and we immediately saw the result: the fairways are firm, even and quite simply beautiful. The first time we decompacted the fairways, everything was brown everywhere and the questions were flying: ‘What’s going on? We’ve never seen anything like it…”. On the other hand, a fortnight later it was the most beautiful course in the world for these same players. These are phases. But on the whole, the players understand very well what we do and what it’s for. There’s less need to explain the point of all these mechanical operations.