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!

It's Aliiiiive

Only been under ice for about 40 days now, but this is sure nice to see.  Last winter I pulled a few plugs out of a green and put them in the windowsill, and they kind of halfway greened up, and it took them a week or two.  These samples are already fully greened up and ready to be mowed after 5 days in my windowsill greenhouse.

However, if the best case scenario brings us an early thaw by mid-march we still have about 20 days under the ice, worst case scenario brings us a late thaw and we could have 40+ more days under ice.  The Poa is just starting to enter its danger zone, so we aren't quite out of the woods yet.  Still hoping for some relatively nice weather soon to at least get the snow and ice cleared off of 16 green.

New Hole Signs, And A Salvaged Piece Of History

Finally, the last old relic of 1980's golf course accessories has been replaced!  The old green-painted, rotten wood, out of date, inaccurate hole signs that were taken down and sold off last fall have been replaced.  The new cast aluminum plaques that I ordered a few months ago arrived on Monday.

The new plaques are a 3 part system.  The top plaque is the GFCC leaf logo, the main plaque in the middle features the hole number and par, and the bottom plaque is reserved for corporate hole sponsors.  Currently we have only 5 of those, so we are in need of picking up some more sponsors in order to complete the look of the rest of the signs.

I started the process or designing and pricing out hole sign replacement options back in November, and once  I finally had the signs picked out, the next question became how to mount them and display them on the golf course.  Originally I had intended on mounting them to a 4x4 post, but then in the end of November with our bridge plank replacement project on #17, the idea came to me to use the old planks from the suspension bridge to mount the plaques onto.

The old planks that came off of the bridge on 17 were anywhere from 10-40 years old (I think).  Some were fairly solid wood, others had decayed to the point where I could kick through them.  I went out and dug through these piles of planks buried in snow back in December, and took a chainsaw and carved up 18 of the nicest, most solid pieces of wood I could find.  Andy and I then went through a fairly extensive restoration process this week to bring the old and weathered pieces of wood back to beauty.

Yep, these bridge planks (pictured here after the spring flood of 2009)
will be used to display our new hole signs.

Planks piled up on the creek bank this fall after the bridge renovation.

Cutting the planks to length in the shop.

Andy spraying wood cleaner on the planks with a backpack sprayer.  They
were all then taken outside and thoroughly pressure washed to completely
restore the wood to its original color and character.

After the planks were completely dry, two coats of stain were applied.

Last step, all the planks were drilled in the appropriate locations in order to
bolt the plaques to them.  Pictured here are the 5 holes with the complete
sponsorship plaques on them.

I will have to admit, there are certainly more ornate ways to display the $5000 worth of new plaques out on the golf course than by using a 40 year old piece of bridge decking.  The bottom line however, was that not only were these planks free, but each of them tells a very unique story of the timeline and history of the Grand Forks Country Club.  When you are out playing this coming summer, look at the back of some of these planks, lots of them are covered in spike marks from when one of you walked across that bridge in the 80's and 90's with an old pair of metal spikes.  Each plank has endured the history and fury of the Red River throughout the years also; likely in 1997 when the majority of the city of Grand Forks was under water, these planks were suffering under the same catastrophic flood waters.  While these pieces of wood were to the point in their life where they were unable to safely support the weight of a cart on a bridge, I hope that their stories will continue to be told by our members while they are on display for a few more decades at GFCC.

Lastly, thanks to all the members to stepped up and purchased the old wooden signs last fall when I sold them off.  We were able to raise $4500 from the sale of those signs, considering that the new signs cost us about $5000, and the posts were free, we only had to put up about $500 to buy these new signs.  Not a bad deal for a way to totally update the look and feel of the tee boxes.  Coupled with the new cedar wood tee markers we made last winter, the new cedar benches and trash can holders we made this winter, and the freshly powder coated black ball washers and their new logoed towels, we are going to have a completely different look on the tee areas this summer.  Not to mention that come this spring two-thirds of the tee boxes will have been totally renovated, I feel like we are finally starting to make some solid strides forward on this golf course....

Winter Pics

Believe it or not, there is such a thing as a beautiful winter day in North Dakota

Sunrise over 18 fairway

Andy clearing the path to the clubhouse

Ice Update

After our 4th blizzard of the winter cleared out on Tuesday, leaving behind it a beautiful sunny day (with a balmy daytime high of -7) I decided to go out and dig some snow pits on 16 green behind the shop to see how the ice was looking underneath.  As I expected, it doesn't look good....

Kind of hard to see, but that ice is close to 1/2" thick.

I dug 7 different pits in the snow on 16 green, and every spot I dug had ice underneath.  Ouch.

For whatever reason, 16 green seems to have the most ice on it.  I was out cross country skiing last week, and dug some holes in 9, 17, and 1 greens and only found very sporadic ice coverage at best.  Whatever damage those greens see will likely be very random and hopefully pretty minor.  Greens like 16, that seem to be close to 100% covered in ice, are the ones that are of the most concern.

The ice formed on January 10th, so at this point the turf has been encased for about 40 days, which is just starting to put the Poa in the danger zone, the bentgrass will without a doubt be just fine.  It would still be nice if we could get a little warm spell here in the next few weeks so Andy and I could at least get the ice cleared off of 16 green.

I chipped a few turf samples from under the ice on 16
green and put them in our "greenhouse" in one of the
south facing windows in the shop.  We will find out
in a few days what is alive after 40 days under ice.