Its Go Time!

After 2012 was the year without a winter, it appears that 2013 is going to be the year without a spring.  Temperatures refuse to get anywhere even close to normal.  We should be into the low 40s everyday now.  Since Thanksgiving, about 120 days, we have recorded 10 days that have been at or above 32 degrees.  That is probably about normal, oddly though most of those days (7) came during January!  Based on the forecast for these remaining few days or March, we are going to end up with more days in January above freezing that we will have had in March.  That seems like it is probably a little backward.....

At some point, if spring doesn't want to happen on its own, then we have to make it happen ourselves!  During the 6 years I spent in Montana, it was a spring ritual to go out in the beginning of April and remove the snow from the greens.  The turf can only take so many days under snow (and even worse, under ice which was our case this winter) and just needs to see the light of day and get some fresh air.  This will give the greens a head start on growth and recovery so that by the time the rest of the course melts off, hopefully the greens are in pretty good shape.

I have historically always used a tracked skid steer with a snowblower, but all that we have at our disposal here is a 3-point PTO operated blower for our tractor, so that was what we used!  Makes it really tricky playing the wind when blowing snow in an open cab tractor....

Had to put in a picture of what we were up against in the spring in
Montana.  Lots of work just to give the greens a few weeks headstart.

Andy taking the snow off of 16 green.

18 green almost cleared off

After the tractor takes off the majority of the snow, we spread a black
organic fertilizer that helps melt the thin remaining layer of snow and ice.
After a few hours in the sun, we use shovels to remove the remaining
slush and get all the way to the grass.

Last year this obviously wasn't an issue since the thin layer of snow that we had in the middle of March melted in only 2 days when the temperatures quickly spiked into the 70s.  This year, with still close to a foot and a half to two feet of snow on the ground and long range forecasts not giving any glimpse of a quick warm up, this is our only resort.  Desperate times call for desperate measures!

Making Preperations

It seems to be almost a sure bet at this point:  we are going to experience some sort of flood this spring.  The most unbelievable part is that we are going to likely experience a large flood even though the entire Red River Basin is in either a moderate or extreme drought!

Fortunately, we know exactly how to prepare for it, since this isn't exactly something new around here.  While it is still an Act of God and at some point there is only so much we can do, there are still lots of things that we can do to minimize the financial impact of the damage, as well as make cleanup and recovery go as quickly and efficiently as possible.

At this point, it appears that our highest likelihood of seeing the crest is still very late, well into the 3rd or 4th week of April.  Considering that we haven't even started to melt the slightest bit of our snowpack yet, that estimate seems pretty accurate.  This means we still have plenty of time to get all of our ducks in a row and make sure that we are prepared for the worst should it occur.

Let's all keep our fingers crossed for a slow melt and a dry spring....

I took a quick xc ski tour of the golf course this afternoon.  It is amazing how peaceful and beautiful the course is this time of year still blanketed in snow.  The Red River still slumbers in frozen hibernation.  It is amazing to think how this small little channel of ice will transform in the coming weeks....

Stay tuned for all the spring updates by following my new twitter account @SRez_Turf

Playing The Waiting Game

Yep.....it's still winter, and spring doesn't even appear to be in the forecast yet...

Snow depths on the course are still averaging about 16"

And of course as I look out the window to write this, it is snowing again, it sounds like we should only get 3"-5" out of this one though.  The 12" of fresh that fell last Monday was a dagger though, both physically to our flood outlook, and mentally and emotionally to myself and Andy who are just chomping at the bit to get out on the course and get to work.

Surely everyone remembers last March though right?  Here is a refresher pic.

This was taken almost exactly one year ago today, it was 71 degrees
and we had guys hitting range balls in shorts!

The forecast for the next 10 days isn't helping us either.  Seasonal averages for this time of March say that we should be having daytime highs of about 35 degrees.  Check out our lovely forecast through the middle of next week.

TODAY

Snow

High: 19 °F

TONIGHT

Snow

Low: 0 °F

SATURDAY

Mostly
Cloudy

High: 13 °F

SATURDAY
NIGHT

Mostly
Cloudy

Low: -5 °F

SUNDAY

Chance
Snow

High: 18 °F

SUNDAY
NIGHT

Snow
Likely

Low: 11 °F

MONDAY

Snow
Likely

High: 17 °F

MONDAY
NIGHT

Chance
Snow

Low: -3 °F

TUESDAY

Mostly
Sunny

High: 16 °F

Allow me to do the math for you.  Our highs for the next five days are a good 20 degrees below average.  Compare that to last year, when on March 17th we topped out at 74 degrees, and we are a good 50-60 degrees colder than last year!  I've said it before; there is no such thing as average anymore, especially in a place like North Dakota where we are about as far as possible from any large, moderating bodies of water to keep our weather "steady".

So the waiting game continues.  At this point the greens have been under ice for over 60 days now, and with temperatures that have continued to be well below average we haven't had a decent window to go out and clear snow and try to melt some ice.  If we would only have had one decent 2 or 3 day stretch in the last few weeks to get some days with some sun and temps in the upper 30's we could have gotten a significant amount of ice off of a lot of the greens.  With each passing day under ice more and more grass continues to die.

And with the continued snow cover, now we start thinking about snowmold again.  Last winter we experienced a paltry 71 days of snowcover.  This year we started continuous snowcover with a pretty good storm on Thanksgiving day, so at this point we have been buried for about 110 days, with at least another week or two to go.  While we did of course make a pretty good preventative snowmold fungicide application last fall, even those products have their limitations under such intense conditions.  We will probably end up with close to 125 days of snowcover this winter, which will put us well into the "extreme" category of snowmold potential.

And lastly, our flood outlook continues to be a bit of a guessing game.  The last forecast put us at a 50% chance of a moderate flood, and only an 11% chance of a major flood.  The worst part of the flood forecast is how late it predicts that we might see a spring flood, with our highest likelihood of seeing the crest coming in the 3rd or 4th week of April.  All that really does is just delay how soon we can finish tee and bunker projects, and then if we do have some damage to the course because of the flood, it is just that much later that we can get things cleaned up and seeded.  I would almost rather have a higher flood that would come sooner here in the next few weeks and just get it over with so we can move on....

So with that, Andy and I are STILL working diligently in the shop.  We are getting pretty thin on projects though.  For the last week we have been doing things like building and staining new benches, painting a new fuel tank we got, stripping and repainting cups, taking apart and rebuilt an old engine, made a new trailer, and believe it or not, Andy got ambitious enough to start cleaning the walls in the shop one afternoon!  Needless to say, we have finished everything that we set out to accomplish this winter, and are extremely ready to get outside and start working on the course....  Damn you global warming!

I built this trailer from scratch to haul our walking greens mowers on.  The
old trailer we used last year didn't hold the mowers in place very well so
they bounced around and got pretty banged up.

New benches

In order for us to meet some updated fuel storage and
containment requirements with the state, we had to
downgrade our old 1000 gallon gas tank to a 500
gallon tank.  I scored a used tank for $500 and got it
looking like new with a $20 coat of paint.

We stripped the paint and have repainted over 50 aluminum cups!