No doubt you are all anxious for us to open the golf course. What follows is an update on the condition of the courses and thoughts on when we might open the golf course.
As of this morning we are starting to remove greens covers from all 41 greens. This is a two day process for us, so we should be done by Friday afternoon.
We have the ability to monitor our soil temperatures via soil probes and a computer program. At the 2” depth the soil is just at freezing or above. At the 6” depth the soil is still very frozen and we are hoping for a good warm rain to drive that frost out of the ground. The forecast looks promising for that on Saturday. The worse case scenario is to have the top inch or so thawed out with frozen ground under it. This scenario creates quite a problem for the root systems on our greens. Below is a snapshot of the soil temperatures in #11 green North this morning. You can see when we get a warm day the 2” soil temperature will raise up then go down at night. We want to see the temperatures consistently stay above the freezing point before we allow foot traffic on the putting surfaces.
The rest of the golf course has over wintered quite well. The turf has very little damage from the winter or winter diseases. We are very happy with the turf condition going into the spring season.
We had a good late fall and winter for pruning of trees. A lot of the trees were elevated especially areas with heavy shade. The heavy pruning will allow for more sunlight in thin or weak turf areas.
What does all of the above mean? We are looking at opening the week of March 16th. If we have warmer than usual temperatures next week, it might be earlier than that. Please know that we are doing our best to get open as soon as possible.
Rick Tegtmeier, CGCS