Is anyone anxious to start golfing??

The temperatures are rising, Cole Creek is flowing, and the grass is showing through all of the snow at the GFCC. As of today, most of the greens are about 75% melted and they appear to have come through the winter in good shape. I plan on meeting with Todd with ProTurf Systems next week sometime, so I will have a report and our plan going forward for the care of our greens.

We have been busy out on the course taking ropes down, helping water move down towards the creek and continuing with our tree removal and trimming. We have removed the line of ash trees on the left of #13 fairway that were a few feet away from the cottonwood row. This will allow for better golf shots, less time mowing and string trimming, and hopefully help the health of the turf in this area. More than 50% of these ash trees were declining in health as they were growing directly into the cottonwood trees.

We removed about 8 other trees around #4, #12, and #14 this past week. All of this tree removal will require stump grinding, which will take place in a few weeks here when the ground dries up more. 

It's hard to set an exact opening date at this point, but the extended forecast has excellent snow melting temperatures in it and we aren't far away from the golf season. The course will take a few days to soak in all of the water once the snow is gone and then we will be ready for play. I will keep everybody posted on our progress and I hope that everyone is excited for a great season at the GFCC!

Trees and more winter

It appears that winter has decided to stick around a little bit longer, but that hasn't kept us from getting some work done around the golf course. We have removed snow fence from the greens and have continued to limb up and remove some trees around the course.

We finished cleaning up the ash trees that we cut down on the left side of #4. This will help the turf thrive in this area as it has always been very thin from all of the shade. It also will be much easier for our rough mowers to mow in this area. We also limbed up the cottonwoods as high as our pole saw will allow us. 

On #11, we limbed up and removed a few trees on the left side at the dogleg. This area was way too crowded with trees. Many were showing signs of it as half of them were starting to die.

Another area that we have spent quite a bit of time trimming trees at is on the right side of #9 along the cart path. There were a few large ash trees hanging over the cart path and fairway that needed to be limbed up. One of them had a large split in it that was an accident waiting to happen. This trimming should help golfers from the tee box see where their ball lands if they hit off to the right.

We will continue to work on our tree trimming list along the golf course as the season goes on. We are just about finished up with sanding, branding, painting, and staining all of our course accessories and we are getting anxious to get out on the golf course on a daily basis. I see 50’s in the near forecast, so we aren’t far away!