Beginning of The Season?

When you are open all year when is the official kick off? When the clubhouse opens back up? When you mow greens for the first time? When you turn the irrigation system on? When the snow birds start arriving? Many of these things happened this week. We began the week by starting the rebuild of the right green side bunker on number two. As with the others we have done, we strip the sod and try to reuse what we can. This time the sod went onto the berm of the Material Storage Area. I imagine everyone is sick of the MSA posts.

Landscaping taking shape. Plants and grass on berm, in place

NOTE: for some reason when I try to add captions to the above pictures weird things happen. So in order: we begin prep of bunker 2 Green, ready for sod, sodded but not quite enough, Me watering with sprayer since irrigation not turned on yet.

 With the need for very little sod to finish the bunker I decided to take the truck off, stay in Sandwich and drive to southern RI to the farm and pick up a pallet so we could wrap up the bunker. I returned on the noon boat and Kevin finished the bunker while I prepped the building and unloaded our fertilizer and seed delivery.

At the sod farm building many forklifts and hundreds of pallets

seasons worth of fertilizer and lime/gypsum

While I was on the road Kevin mowed tees and collars and Will mowed greens. Both the earliest in my 17 seasons, so what that means for the rest of the spring I could not tell you. We are scheduled to turn on the irrigation this coming week, however. Other news of interest this week was the seminar at Gillette That Kevin and I went to last year. see here for that fun trip. This year I went solo as Will had jury duty so Kev had to man the fort and help get the pro-shop open for the season.

Gillette set up for soccer. notice the club seats removed. being replaced already

really is a cool spot for a seminar. hats off to Tom Irwin for putting on another informative session

With a massive wind storm for two days a little over a week ago the place is once again littered with stick and twigs. So before we can mow we have to clean that up. With greens and tees done we will focus on fairways and then green and tee surrounds. Mike is in this weekend to help keep things moving. Frank came in this week to put out the painted ball washers and I expect will be in next week to start filling some of the many divots taken this winter. With the irrigation turn on and the gas pump being replaced I expect another busy week. Sure feels like the season has started whatever you use to call it official.