Fingers Crossed

     I took a very cold and windy course tour this morning to look at how things melted off the rest of Friday and Saturday.  Almost all of the greens at Wildflower are exposed and all but a few areas are disease free and looking to be ready for play in 5 days.  Despite our best efforts last fall, there was a little snow mold damage to 12 green, but with a little TLC once the temps come back to normal, we should be looking at a good "green-up" this spring. 

Welcome to work

Welcome to the Wildflower Golf Course Maintenance facility.  I wish I could have had a GoPro video Camera of me crawling into the shop this morning before this path was shoveled, probably would have gotten some laughs at 23 below zero this morning...  To say we have some drifts around the shop and pro shop is an understatement.  According to the Minnesota climatology website we're only in the 60th percentile for snow depth rankings according to the historical data, but the amount of drifting snow and where it rests is quite inconvenient.  Last year, we weren't even close to the amount of drifted snow around the shop as we are currently sitting, and it's not even February yet!

Snow Removal on #1 PG, #1, #8 & #18 Greens

      By this time last year, wildflower golf course was mowing their greens and golfers were chasing after the little white pill...  What a difference a year makes! 
      Monday started out by contemplating whether or not to remove snow from our most covered greens on the course.  After Tolly and I took a walk around and did some digging on the greens, we decided it was time to help Mother Nature along and get our greens uncovered.  Some of you may have passed by the Country Club and saw that they have already uncovered their greens.  Our reason for waiting is simply that we have predominately bentgrass greens and bent can withstand much colder temperatures and survive much longer under ice cover than Poa annua.  I'm not saying that the country club has Poa greens... I'm just saying that is why we decided to wait and uncover at this time. 
     While we decided to uncover greens, this proved to be the easiest task of the day.  Using a walk behind snow blower and the John Deere tractor, we uncovered #1 green and saw that there was well over an inch of solid ice laying under the 20+ inches of snow.
     Tuesday, Tolly brought in his father's Kubota estate tractor (that's what Bob calls them) to help us get into tight spots and take some of the weight off the greens.  This Kubota is an amazing machine, clearing a path from the back side of #1 green down to #8 green seemingly effortlessly and we were able to uncover #8 much faster than #1 the day before.
     Currently, we are uncovering the #1 PG by the pro shop and #18 green.  We have a few cart paths opened up and hope to get up to the driving range shortly so we can start working up there and get the range open before the course. 
     We will check back in later to let you know what were going to do about all the ice we've uncovered...
-Aaron