Golf Course Update on Winterkill and Pond Dredging Project #13 Irving Park Course

Greensboro Country Club President, Thomas Watkins, recently sent out an email to the membership briefly outlining the scale of the damage that has been inflicted on the two courses from this past winter's cold spell.  While most people now recognize how cold this past January was the months of March and April were also well below average in temperatures.  While we knew early on we had a fair amount of damage on the tees, fairways and roughs, we struggled to quantity just how much until we received a week or more of warm seasonal temperatures that seemingly took forever to get here.  In a typical year the two courses are fully green from tree line to tree line by the end of April.  This year we estimate that we are approximately two -three growing weeks behind a normal year.  While we spent a lot of time probing areas to try and determine just what we would be facing it is an almost impossible task to accurately forecast these damaged areas until Mother Nature takes her course and clearly defines them for you.

Early Stages of Winterkill Definition IP #7 2018

Winterkill #7 Fairway 2015

Now that these areas have somewhat defined themselves we know we have about 5 acres of damaged turf between the two courses that will need to be repaired.  To repair these areas the staff will be asked to use a sod cutter to cut off the top layer of dead turf.  Then they will need to hand shovel the dead material into a utility vehicle and prepare the surface for new sod.  Once approximately 10,000 square feet of turf area has been prepared the crew will work to install the sod, begin the new establishment phase and move onto the next 10,000 sf plot.  While this sounds simple enough it is a very laborious process that will take time to accomplish.  We expect to average 1 truckload a week for the next 12 weeks, therefore we hope to have this work behind us by the latter part of July.  We will try to focus on the most important playing areas up front and work our way to the lesser important areas last.  Throughout this same time period we will be actively fertilizing and aerifying the damaged areas to promote as much recovery along the edges as possible.  With warm weather during the month of June we expect to see a measurable percentage of these areas shrink in size on their own.  With that taken into consideration, we hope to have a very presentable course by the latter part of June.

Removing the Winterkilled Turf

While we now recognize just how cold this past winter was it is best represented by looking at how much damage we had to our Zoysiagrass on the Farm course this year.  Zoysia is significantly more cold tolerant than Bermudagrass, but its cold tolerance was fully tested this year with several areas failing the test.  We are currently estimating we lost 22,000 sf of Zoysia this year in comparison to the brutal winterkill year of 2015 where we lost ~ 2,000 sf.

Zoysia Damage Farm Course #7

Pond Dredging Project Irving Park Hole #13

We recently drained the pond on the Irving Park course in an effort to remove the small island that had formed over the past many years from upstream sediment and debris buildup.  The pond has become an aesthetic eyesore with the noticeable island of debris and the overall shallow nature of the pond that makes it very difficult to maintain any semblance of an acceptable level of water quality.  We had hoped to use some small turf friendly excavation equipment in an effort to get the debris well below the surface in an effort to return a full surface of water back across the pond.  This was meant to be a temporary fix until the club could work a full scale pond reclamation project into its long term capital planning.  Once the pond was fully drained and the extent of buildup could be more clearly seen it quickly became apparent that in order to accomplish the original task of limited debris removal it would require much larger equipment and would therefore need to be rescheduled.  We are currently working on revising our estimates for this project and will be submitting the new proposal for Board reconsideration.  In the meantime the pond will be allowed to refill and due to the shallow nature of the pond and its small size we predict the moderate rains forecasted for this weekend will quickly refill the pond.  If not we will refill manually with wells located in close proximity to the pond. We currently hope we can restart working on and finish this project by early summer.

#13 Pond in a Drained State