The Season Begins

Wednesday, April 1st marked the official opening of the golf course for 2015, and with temperatures near 70 degrees, it was a fitting start to a mostly mild winter and early spring.  While the golf season got off to a slightly earlier start during the freakishly warm March of 2012, nevertheless this is a much better start to the season than the last two years with no flood in sight, a golf course that at this point appears to have avoided any major turf loss, and some decent weather to start the spring.

Collin putting out the cups and flags for the start of the season on Wednesday morning

The staff did a quick clean up of the bunkers to get them moderately playable,
but they are still in need of much more in depth attention in the coming weeks
to get them edged and get all the sand pushed back up the faces.

Another large spring task is getting a fresh coat of stain on all of
our outdoor wood accessories.

While the course is open for play at this time, lots of the turf on the course is still dormant and will not be greening up anytime too soon, as the weather in April will still likely remain fairly cool.  Without much mowing in the near future, our attention in the coming weeks will be on the following projects:

• Clubhouse landscaping.  We have already started the process of regrading the front lawn area and installed an irrigation system.  Soon we will be installing all new plant material in the landscape beds, installing new concrete edgers, and reseeding the entire lawn area.
• Pumpstation reassmebly.  Our irrigation pumps that we pulled out last fall and were rebuilt over the winter have been reinstalled, but there remains a lot of pipe fitting and fine tuning of the system in order to get it ready for use.
• Finishing drainage projects.  We installed a lot of new drain lines last fall to connect bunker drains that need to be topped off with topsoil, and then either seeded or sodded.
• Bunker detail.  It is a long process of cleaning up and pushing all the sand back up on the faces of the bunkers after our rough winters.
• Finishing cartpath projects.  We will be sodding around the new sections of cartpath on 1, 10, 2, and 15, however most of the sod farms in our area will not start harvesting sold until at least the end of April.  We also need to finish building a small retaining wall for a landscape bed in between the cartpaths by 1/10 red tee.