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| Iced #3 fairway |
Wow, we've had some cold, dry weather the past two weeks! That cold, dry air can really take a toll on young ryegrass seedlings and I see some damage on a few fairways driving around the golf course. Thankfully, it's 65 degrees outside today and we are expecting some rain this weekend. The extremely low temperatures have really hindered our ability to get water on the golf course as we can not run water when the air temperature is below 32 degrees. Given the fragile nature of our irrigation system, the attached photo is a good example of what happens. Essentially the head stuck on and then ran all night creating a sheet of ice on the fairway that we had to route traffic around to prevent damage to the turf below.
In an effort to combat the freezing conditions some facilities use tarps to cover greens during excessively cold spells. Knowing there are a few greens on the golf course that freeze when the temperatures get low we purchased a large tarp to trap some heat and keep the green a little warmer. We are testing this out on the back side of #6 green this year. This is the section of the green that gave us so much trouble this past winter/spring due to excessive tree shading and the frozen surface.
I am hoping that by tarping the back of the green during multiple cold days, we will keep the plant warmer and keep it from going into a dormant state so that it will come out of winter stronger than last year. Should you be playing on a day that we have deemed it necessary to leave the tarp on the green, please consider it ground under repair if your ball comes to rest on the tarp. Generally we expect to completely remove the tarp during warmer spells, but we will leave the tarp rolled off the back of the green on days where the night time lows will be excessively low for consecutive nights. There was a very distinct line of where the tarp was when we removed it this past week.As the trees behind the green continue to grow taller, this green will continue to have shade issues and frozen conditions unless we can remove or thin the the trees behind the green.
I am sometimes asked during these days when the temperatures are excessively cold, "What are you guys doing today?" I wanted to take a few minutes to elaborate on cold weather maintenance and what we do when it is just too cold for grass to grow and the golf course is not busy. As some of you may have noticed, we have begun adding pine straw to the beds at tee boxes and cleaning up some of the larger landscaping beds. This is work that unfortunately gets pushed to the winter time because we simply do not have the staff to keep up with these periphery projects during the growing season.
However, we also have an entire fleet of turf equipment that gets annual maintenance inspections, oil changes and lubes, cutting units sharpened, and equipment parts replaced.
In our fleet there are:
- 2 heavy duty utility carts
- 8 general use utility carts
- 2 greens mowers
- 1 tee mower
- 12 cutting reels to be sharpened
- 2 fairway mowers each with 5 cutting units
- 1 slopes/surrounds mower
- 1 30 hp tractor
- 1 45 hp tractor
- 1 60 hp tractor
- 1 pull behind rough mower
- 2 pine straw sweeping machines
- 1 3-wheeled bunker machine
- 2 dedicated sprayers
- 1 dedicated greens roller
- 1 topdresser
- small attachment items that we use occasionally throughout the year.
The winter time is the best time to do fluid changes and larger preventive maintenance on these pieces of equipment as the frequency of use is much less than during the growing season and we can really take our time to keep the equipment in top shape. Most of the equipment that we use on the golf course is between 4 and 6 years old. To put a number on this, our greens mowers have about 2000 hours on them. A good equation to car miles is 100 miles per hour of use. That would be the equivalent of having over 200,000 miles on a car!
Wrapping up, have a safe holiday during these upcoming weeks. We look forward to seeing you out enjoying this warm weather!
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