Early Signs of Spring!

Seasonal employee Andrew McDonnell puts the first cut on #8 green.

 

There were times this winter that I had a hard time believing the snow would ever melt, and questioned whether April would actually arrive, or if we had entered some sort of perpetual winter that brought snow every single Saturday.

April has indeed arrived, and with it has come the first signs of our golf course waking up for the spring.  Many of us superintendents have been waiting patiently (sort of patiently) for the snow to melt so that we could finally see our turf and begin assessing the damage that may have occurred over what has been one of the snowiest and coldest winters on record.  As I have worked my way around the golf course and inspected greens, tees, and fairways, I have been pleased at what I have found so far.  We have had minimal turf damage from the winter and what did occur was on Poa annua and mostly near edges of fairways where water tends to sit for longer periods of time.  I believe this damage is a result of crown hydration during the few warm spells and then freezing during the extremely cold spells that inevitably happened after the warm ups.  As I said our damage was minimal and many areas will recover on their own without and seeding.

Our seasonal staff has begun to slowly return to the club and have been busy cleaning up winter debris and we have even mowed greens.  In the next week, I expect cleanup to continue along with fairway and tee mowing and plan on starting to put out our course accessories. Before too long the course will look playable again!

I will continue to post updates to this blog as spring goes on, and will soon be posting updates on our golf course improvement project.  Exciting times are upon us in 2014!