As the calendar prepares to turn to March, the Grounds
department prepares to head back outside from winter. We have painted and
cleaned and prepped for the golf season and now it is just around the corner.
One of our current tasks is preparing our machines for aeration. Our aerator, a
Toro Procore 648, will be serviced and outfitted with new aeration tines. Aeration
is scheduled for March 21st-23rd but if the weather
allows we will aerate at any point sooner than that. There are two main reasons
for us wanting to start aeration as soon as we can. First, if the weather is
conducive to allowing aeration then it will also be conducive to allow healing.
By aerating sooner we will allow for more healing time and less impact on the
start of the golf season. Second, by aerating early, we would be able to
separate our aeration procedure from our seed head control program. You can
read more about seed head control here or
more about aeration healing and seed heads here.
Bottom line is, if we aerate early enough, one practice won’t impact the other.
One might wonder, then why we don’t just schedule aeration for an earlier time?
We can’t count on the weather being favorable enough to plan aeration for too
early. If it’s too wet or too cold and we miss our scheduled time, then we are
stuck trying to fit it in around the early season golf. So we stick with our
mid-March schedule and hope for earlier. This way, if we can’t do it early, but
we are able to do it at our regularly scheduled time, the members are only
impacted exactly as it was scheduled to happen and no worse.
We also have purchased some new equipment to help get this
season off to a good start as well. A new greens roller, a new tractor, as well
as some smaller tools have all been added to our fleet. The roller is similar
to our current machine, but the newest model. The tractor will be used with our
over-seeder that was purchased last year. The tractor is bigger and more
powerful than our other tractors and will manage the heavy seeding machine with
ease. Because the seeder is heavy it put unnecessary stress on the smaller
tractors and we would only use the seeder when it was absolutely needed to
avoid the wear on our tractor. Now we will have a tractor that has more than
enough strength to manage the seeder. These purchases will be tremendous
upgrades and will help us to provide better conditions and continue to raise
the bar for playability of the course.
All this talk of aeration, golf, and spring can get everyone
excited, even us. However, let’s not assume that Mother Nature is finished with
winter just yet. Meteorological winter runs through the end of February, but
astronomical winter extends until the third week of March, the 20th
this year. Temperatures will start to change and averages have been climbing
for some time now. But we may have a snow storm or two to get through and we
will still have plenty of frost delays with which to deal!
Also, starting in March we will be going back to weekly posts
for the season.
Etiquette Reminder of the Month
Please don’t play on greens that are partially or completely
covered in snow.
See you on the course!
Joe
jvillegas@bwrc.org
