Winter damage

Now that the greens have started growing, we are able to see where the winter damage has occurred.  A few greens have significant damage and will take a month to fully recover, most of the greens have just a few small spots that will heal rather quickly with some warm weather.  This damage came from ice cover over the winter, we were at the limit of ice cover on poa greens.

12 green suffered the most damage.  If you look at the picture below, you can see how far we have come but this green will take another month to get back to normal.  We are seeing a fair amount of green turf underneath the brown just waiting to pop up, a majority of this will grow back on its own, there will be a few spots that will need to be plugged out.

There is also damage to the greens from other sources - foot traffic.  This is a great example of why we close the course once the grounds freezes and the turf stops growing.

Someone decided to walk across 9 green at some point while we were closed, leaving a nice trail.  Eventually this too will recover, I see a little green underneath the damaged turf.

One of the capital purchases we recently made was a bed knife grinder.  This grinder allows us to grind the knives for all our reel mowers.  This machine is safer, quicker and provides a quality of cut that we couldn't match in the years prior.  We put it to good use this week.