Spring is going backwards!

We have been enduring some beautiful (albeit windy) cool season grass growing weather. The bluegrass on the Sabot fairways has filled in nicely and we even put some growth regulator on it so that we may only mow it once a week. The bentgrass greens are firm and rolling nicely. Unfortunately out of about 250 acres of turf we manage only 40 are cool season.

The bermudagrass, especially anything that was really greening up on the Manakin, has been set back this week from cold temperatures. A few frosts mixed with cold temperatures means bermuda is going nowhere.

Here is a chart showing soil temperatures over the last 30 days on #1 Manakin. Those few days in the 70's got everything greened up but lately we have had nothing positive in the way of warm weather. Until we can get an average soil temperature in the mid 60's the bermuda is not going to do much. This is not necessarily a bad thing considering being limited on staff but either way we are ready to grow some bermuda!

Not being in a full scale mowing pattern means we can finish up a few projects. Juan finished up the pavers around Joe's new water cooler house that he built this past winter. These pavers were harvested from the small area behind the tavern that we now turned into a flower bed.

Our major project for the week was installing the electric wire for 6 new fans around both courses. 6 new fans will (hopefully) be placed on 2 Sabot and 3, 4, 5, 12 and 13 Manakin. We put this wire in the ground ourselves in order to save a handsome sum of money. We traveled 3,450 feet (.65 miles) and put in just over 10,000 feet of wire.

The vibratory plow placed the wire 24" into the ground relatively smoothly. After some quick footwork and a roll with the tractor, the line smoothed out and will be unnoticeable once things start growing. John Gibson guided us along the 3,450 feet perfectly, crossing 5 different cartpaths, going over the main irrigation line 4 different times as well as countless lateral irrigation lines.

The cartpath crossings we filled in with hot asphalt on Thursday. We filled in 6 different path crossings for $106.

While we had the plow on property we also did some work on the Sabot irrigation system. A few irrigation heads had been added in about 10 years ago to help irrigate the rough on 12, 13 and 14. These heads were never wired into the central control system. The only way for them to run was by turning them on by hand. We plowed in additional wire in order to hook all of these heads in to the central. Now we will be able to run them more reliably from the computer or our phones.