Spring preparation

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 21^st-23^rd 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 20^th 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