SPRING

Well it is official. We have had some signs with birds coming back, the peepers singing their song, the supplies for the year coming in, the golf carts arriving. But the weather is reluctant to show up with any regularity. It has been windy at times and with temps at or just above freezing it sure does not feel like Spring. In fact, tonight they are predicting 2-4 inches of snow. We have received 6.6" of precip since Feb 20th and with that a lack of sunshine, so a pretty dreary month. The course had some players this past weekend being our first official one in the club house operations fully open. Weather was OK but not stellar. spring fever is setting in and you see more activity outside regardless of temperature, people just want to get outside.

Blacky the feral cat who has made MMGC his home- in parking lot

Chris & Murph in the pump house prepping and painting

Will adding new ferrules and removing old vinyl from flag sticks

 The boys continue to make a dent in the course clean up and even took turns learning how to roll greens. The biggest issue now is choosing when to mow for the first time. This may seem like an easy question to answer but when the high for this month was 55 and two days later the low was 23 it gets a little more complicated. I learned of a new addition to a Professor's online library of books on turf grass this week. Dr Karl Danneberger's latest book to be available online is titled Winter Injury and is available free on Itunes. So if you have a gizmo to read books online check it out. This book has some great illustrations of the different types of winter injury and does a great job of explaining the physiological process plants go through to harden off to survive winter and sub freezing temperatures. It takes months for the plants to prepare on the cellular level and they need that time to reverse the process as well. As the conditions change with: more sunlight, warmer ambient temps and warmer soil temps the plants break dormancy. Mowing will act as a signal and stimulate growth. I certainly do not want to be mowing a lot of grass these days as we do not even have the place cleaned up yet and I still want to construct a few more forward tees. Not to mention some of my staff, Fred & Otis, are still busy snow birding. But most importantly I do not want to do anything to set the turf backwards. It has done well to survive this Winter and if I mow off the old tissue and wake them up and we dip into the low 20's the shock could do damage. So we roll greens and wait out this schizophrenic weather pattern and hope next week moderates a little bit. We and the players are doing our best to temper ourselves and looking over my records we are right in the wheel house for first mowing's. In the last decade 2012 was the earliest at 3/14 but the latest was in 2007 at 4/12. I did catch a nice sunset this week so in case you are getting home sick for the Island:

Mink Meadows beach 3/20/13

Update: friday morning first light. They were right about the snow