Back to Reality

Summer in March officially gave way back into spring the last few days, with temps closer to, but still a little above average.  Believe it or not, the inch or so of snow we received last night was actually just what the doctor ordered.  By the end of the day on Tuesday we finished all of the final grading and prepping on our project by 15 green/16 tee.  We were able to get everything seeded, including 16 tee.  We now have 5, 12, 13, and 16 tees seeded, and it isn't even the beginning of April yet!  The super wet snow we received slowly melted over the course of the day today, and all the of seed we put in the ground was in the perfect position to imbibe all of that water on it's way to germination.  A few sunny days in the next week or so and we should be seeing some little green sprouters popping up everywhere that we seeded.  The only thing we have to finish on 15 is the final construction of the bunker.  We will likely wait for all the grass to grow in around it, then cut the edge, clean up the inside, and add the sand last.

16 tee and cartpath project finished...mostly.

I was also able to get out and do the rough shaping on the 14 tee complex this week also.  I must say, it is coming together nicely.  Still a long way to go, but you should be able to get the idea of what we're going for here....

Thanks also to Florians Excavating for the early use of their
tracked skiddy, it is quite the machine and has made short
work of some serious lifting this spring.

I have to admit, I have my blinders on a little bit still this time of year though.  I have been so focused with this early start on working on all of our projects that I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to the turf yet.  Everything is slowly starting to break dormancy, but still has a long way to go before we are fully green out there.  Things look to be coming along nicely though, and I expect that we may be able to start mowing greens in another week or two. 

I snapped a neat photo today on the putting green.  This is the reason why Poa Annua is technically considered a weed.  I can only imagine how good a uniform stand of true bentgrass would look compared to this junk.  I think if I showed this picture to a turf pathologist and told him that it was July, he would say that we had a horrible case of Dollar Spot.  Nope, just Poa.  We'll keep an eye on the temps and make sure we get the Proxy out to keep the seed heads at bay again this year and hopefully after a few more weeks no one will even know the Poa is even there...