The Course is Open!

There are so many items that must get done before the course can officially open. We normally don’t have weather like we are experiencing this year; therefore we can get most things done at a more casual pace. This year is the most unusual of my career. We will have mowed the greens three times before April 1 and sand top-dressed them as well.

Here is a picture of Nelson Avila cutting the green for the first time this year. We measure the height of cut in 1000’s of an inch. It is very clear where he has cut - notice the mower lines.

All the ball washers are going out along with the benches, tee markers and bunker rakes. Everything we worked on this winter is going out for use. Our course weathered the winter wonderfully; our fairways, in my opinion, have never come out of winter looking so good. In one of my earlier posts I showed a fairway unit getting rebuilt. Well here it is cutting grass on hole 5 driven by Jose Garcia. This machine is cutting grass at a ½” or as we measure it .500”.

It takes a lot of work to remove the stumps of the ash trees we cut down this winter. Here is a picture of Guadalupe Gonzalez stump grinding; we then come back with soil that we composted in the dump and fill the holes. They then will be sodded and will be temporarily ground under repair.

New bunkers deserve close attention. Before we start raking the sand bunkers, we want to make sure that they are edged properly; and here is a picture of our crew hand trimming the edge to the bunker. It is detail work like this that will keep our remodeled course looking good.

Well, anyone who felt we had a short golfing season here last year better make it over to Cress Creek to take advantage of this very early spring weather. Please bear with us as we try to get everything done early this year. The course really is in great shape for April 1st. No fooling!

Getting Ready!

Getting a golf course ready for play for the membership is like spring cleaning your entire house but a hundred times over! You have seen in my other posts that we have to re-build equipment, paint, cut down trees and 100’s of other little jobs. We hope everything is tuned up and ready to go. Once the outside work begins, then the real work starts - dealing with Mother Nature. I drive the course and see all the clean-up needed, and then I look at the weather forecast … rain. We are limited to the number of men we can call up to work. As we all know, sometimes they get the forecast correct other times they don’t. So I bring a couple of guys in to start raking and when I say raking, we are talking truck-loads of branches. Every part of the course needs work, but we begin by hand raking green and tee banks.

I would love to bring in more men and really knock this work out quickly, but I have to worry about keeping them busy once it does start to rain. We need the fairways, tees, and greens to be dry so we can use the bigger blowers. The greens and tees can be done with hand held blowers, but we use cart driven blowers to clean the fairways. Then we need good, dry ground to go around picking up the piles of debris. The week of March 15th looks to be promising to get clean-up work done. I have a dual-edge sword when asking men to come back. Once you call them in, they expect to work every day. Well, as we all know, we could have two or three weeks of frosty weather after a good week this time of year. Here you can see the men have their carts full of branches that they were picking up near the cart paths when the rain became too much. In the background you can see the puddle starting on the green.

It is amazing when you drive the course and see all the mess yet, in just a few weeks, you will see mowers and golfers. I have opened the greens for play just twice before April 1 in the past 15 years. I believe the weather went right back into freezing temperatures afterwards. The one key to knowing your grass will be growing and staying green is when the soil temperatures stay above 55 degrees. About three straight days of above 65 is when the fairways green up. We really need actively growing grass to support golf. If the grass is not growing, the ballmarks and divots really start to build up. Additionally, the rough can’t take the cart traffic.

Every fall we spray the playing surfaces for snow mold. It would be too costly to spray the rough. But it does get attacked; here is a picture of Justin Kirtland looking at some pink snow mold in the rough. This is one of our worst spots, but it will grow back quickly. Bentgrass fairways, tees and greens don’t recover like the rough and are a lot more noticeable. Fortunately, we are extremely clean from tee to green. Fungicides, while expensive, are imperative to winter survival.

Well the Masters is around the corner. All it takes is for our membership to watch that for a day, and I know what to expect! So as much as you want to come out, we want to get things cleaned up for you. It is just frustrating while, as I write this, we have had another ½ “of rain.