Spring update

Hi Everyone,

 Promptly after starting the blog I decided to rip my office apart and paint it from top to bottom, great for the office, but not so great for updating the blog (my computer was out of commission) Here is a pic of the finished product:

 I must say there is nothing like a fresh coat of paint to get the spring off on the right foot (you'd think i owned stock in a paint company!)

 But on to the golf course. I had a great post all set to go last week when summer decided to peek out for a few days. We had three days above 15degrees, with the last one getting as high as 23! Well that was last week...as I stare out my window right now we are having the first real Nor Easter of the season. It has been blowing all day, but thankfully not a lot of snow has fallen. No big deal really, the kids feel better after getting only their second snow day of the year! Below I will post a few pictures of the course that were taken on the 23 deg. day, what a glorious walk it was...

                                                           #8 fairway from the turn

                                                       The putting green melting slowly

                                                             # 3 green completely bare

                       #11 green from the back right( the black stuff is sunflower seeds, more on that later)

                                                                  #5 from the tees

                                                      #14 green (again with the seeds)

   Overall the course is looking quite good. I never like to get to excited one way or another, but I am feeling a lot better about the condition of things right now than I did a few weeks ago. The warm weather did wonders for melting off the ice and the turf looks healthy underneath. # 11 green did worry me a bit since it had had snow and ice covering it from back in December. Oddly enough it looked the best of all the greens.
  It was not only the warm weather that took care of the ice on the greens. Back in early January, the end of January, the end of February, and even last week we were out spreading either dark sand or black oil sunflower seeds on the ice to speed up the melt. The dark color of the seeds and sand eats through the ice quite a bit faster, thus speeding up the melt. A shout out to Finn and an even bigger shout out to my 9 year old son Lucas for helping with the process.
  So the next step will be removing the covers from the greens. I have not been enjoying this part of the job over the last couple of seasons as we left them on a bit to long and the greens grew like crazy...

                                              pretty straight lines, but way to many clipping...

 Many would question why this would be an issue, after all growing grass is what we do right? But no that is not what we do. In my mind our main job is to prepare a great surface on which to play the game of golf. Grass growing like crazy does not lend itself to great playing conditions. It also does not help the greens to be growing at an unnatural rate first thing in the spring. To much growth leaves them shocked when the colder weather inevitably sets back in through late April and early May. So the goal in the next couple of weeks will be to peel off the tarps before we get a big flush of growth, just long enough to wake the up a bit, but not so ling as to require a major haircut. I will speak more on this subject during the next while.
Thanks so much,
Paul .