GFCC: Marchuary Is Finally Over

Not sure who coined the term, but we have just experienced "Marchuary" since the entire month felt more like January than a typical March. It has been a tough month for the turf, since for the most of the month everything was still covered in snow or ice. We just finished clearing all of it off our greens by the end of last week, removing the snow and ice from close to 3 acres of turf. The ice layer formed on our greens on January 10th after a mid-winter rain storm fell on top of 4" of snow, and then froze solid overnight. All told we experienced about 75 days of ice cover.

As I mentioned in some previous blogs, Poa Annua can take about 40-50 days under ice before death starts to set in. Bentgrass can take close to 100 days under ice, sometimes more. The following pictures pretty well sum it up.

Close to 1" of solid ice formed in spots on 4 green.

The tale of two grasses: bentgrass is dark green.
Poa is pale yellow.

I have been putting a lot more turf samples into my windowsill "greenhouse" in the last 2 weeks. The bentgrass continues to pop right back to life. Of the Poa plugs I have put in there, some have popped right back, some have struggled but finally came back, and some are flat out dead. There definitely was some variation in the formation of the ice that allowed some turf to survive under it. All told though, I don't really expect the damage to be nearly as widespread as the death from dessication that our golf course received last winter. There's always a silver lining I suppose!

Now that Marchuary is over, we can total up some weather records. Not surprisingly, March 2013 was a little....well, a LOT colder than March 2012. Last March provided a record setting average temperature of almost 38 degrees, about 12 degrees warmer than average. This March, we totaled a chilly average of 16 degrees, a full 22 degrees colder than last year and close to 10 degrees colder than average. Also, 19.2" of snow fell in the month of March, which barely broke the old record of 19" set in 1966 to make this the snowiest March on record in Grand Forks. Breaking down the days individually, in 2012 there were 5 days in March colder than average, and 26 days warmer than average. 2013 turned out to be almost a perfect mirror of that number, with 6 days warmer than average, and 25 days colder than average.

Currently we have a snowpack of about 8" on the ground, I really hope that the majority of that will be melted by this weekend. There will of course be some large drifts left remaining for another few weeks though....