Turfgrass health.

The turfgrasses at Metamora went through the toughest winter in their history. Although we will not know for sure until things start to grow I do not anticipate a lot of damage to the greens. The fairways and tees will be fine. What I am seeing right now is a lot of scorched looking leaves on the greens, but a lot of the crowns (most important part of the plant) appear to be healthy.  It is important to understand that recovery will be slow, recovery will always happen underground first, before visible evidence occurs above ground.  Another thing to keep in mind is this post was written on April 6th, the turf thinks it's early March.

We have extracted numerous plugs and examined the greens throughout this winter, and everything that was sampled has responded favorably.  Although there was ice of all types that had formed on many of our greens, I never felt good about removing it because of how cold it got this winter. Below is a picture that shows damage I caused by shoveling a couple of spots and a progression of growth on damaged looking plugs.

Every golf course is different and each course is required to deal with ice differently. In our case I feel that leaving the snow and ice on the greens was our best option. Anyone that plays Metamora knows how windy it can get here. Certain times this winter it got pretty windy and with temperatures in the minus's that could of made things a lot worse. I feel we have a really good plan in place to expedite recovery if damage has occurred. Please check back to this blog for additional updates.