Ice Storms and Aerification

While the two together are not necessarily what we ordered, sometimes you just take what your given and do the best can to find a desirable outcome. Last Thursday (3/6) brought 3-5 inches of snow and sleet and more importantly somewhere between a 1/4 and 1/2 an inch of ice to many parts of Guilford County.  The ice proved to be too heavy for a great many of our evergreen trees, which resulted in a significant number of trees and huge numbers of limbs breaking due to the weight of the ice.  The vast majority of tree damage was isolated to the Irving Park course.  We see this temperature differential often between the courses.  The in-town Irving Park course can be 2-3 degrees warmer than the out of town Farm course.  That slight differential in temperatures must have been just enough to keep the snow and sleet from converting to freezing rain for long enough to accumulate to a significantly damaging level.

While the cleanup work at Irving Park has begun it will likely take the next 4-8 weeks before we will have the course back to its pre-storm condition.  The crew will be working hard this week on the exterior portions of the holes along the streets where access is easiest. Debris will be piled along the streets for future removal, which we hope will be aided by city debris collection services.  If not, we will eventually remove these piles through a combination of chipping and hauling.  Once the course has dried out enough to access the interior portions of the course we will begin collecting those areas for chipping and/or removal.  Last but not least we will repair damage to the turf left by fallen trees and grind the numerous stumps left from fallen and snapped trees.  The good news from all this, as I alluded to above, is the Farm course experienced only minor tree damage and that staff will not have to face the daunting cleanup effort faced by their peers at Irving Park.

AERIFICATION BEGINS ON THE FARM COURSE
As such, the Farm staff was able to begin aerifying greens yesterday (3/10), which was already one week late due a winter event last week that forced us to postpone this work.  While we got a late start Monday morning due to snow cover still being on a few of the greens and a few greens still being frozen they did make a lot of progress yesterday and expect to finish sometime later this afternoon.  As is typical for this time of the year the recovery window is expected to take a minimum of three weeks before green speeds are back to our defined roll standards.







SPRING WEED CONTROL
One of the items we have been focused on for the past several weeks has been applying our spring and summer weed control products to both courses.  While treating some 250 acres of turf with a sprayer is always difficult this time of the year, this year has been especially difficult.  Wind, rain, below freezing temperatures and snow cover has us way behind where we would like to be for this time of the year.  And despite the cold temperatures it only takes a small period of warm temperatures to heat the soil up enough for weeds to begin germinating. With that in mind, we may find ourselves in a position where we are forced to spray certain areas of the course with our sprayers that would normally be considered too wet for treatment.  As is often the case when working around Mother Nature sometimes the short term negatives related to things like tire tracks on any given hole are necessary to benefit from the gains of long term weed control and suppression.