May Update

Oakfield has opened for another season, and like what seemingly has become tradition, the weather has been horrible. We had a beautiful Saturday for over 300 rounds, but surrounding that has been a lot of cold, wet, and windy weather that has kept play light.

The greens have been making a lot of positive progress filling in thin areas.

10 Green April 26th. The front of the green sustained the most damaged of any other green or area

May 4th. 9 Days after the previous picture

The front of 2 still needs some time, but is recovering well

1 Green has recovered very quickly, opening more pin positions up as this week progresses

We have opened the season without any temporary greens but have had to adjust pin rotations on some greens to keep some areas that suffered winter damage as free from foot traffic as possible. My thinking is that we need to have at least 3 spots that we can put the pin in order for the green to be opened. Leaving a pin in 1 spot exclusively will keep traffic away from recovering areas, but the turf quality in that area will degrade. By having a few spots to cut the hole we can disperse traffic effectively. The exception for us is currently on the 6^th hole where we will be placing the pin on the upper right shelf 2 out of every 3 days. This part of the green is rarely used during the season and do not mind a little extra traffic up there. The front of the green still needs time to come back and with the middle of the green having minimal pin positions because of the grade, this option makes the most sense.

Weather conditions appear to be improving as frigid nights are becoming less frequent and day time highs in the high teens are becoming more common place. Monitoring Growth Potential is becoming a common practice that turf managers use to determine things like mowing schedules and fertilizer applications. GP is measured by taking into account daily average temperature and optimum growing temperatures for the species of turf in question. More variables, such as solar radiation, soil temperature, and soil moisture can also be factored in. Sparing losing everyone in the minutia, the purpose of bringing this up is to illustrate how much tougher of a spring it has been to grow grass than average. See the diagram below showing a typical spring vs. this season.

The first graph shows how far behind we are getting the weather needed to really push turf growth. Also important to note our average springs aren't very good to begin with!

Beyond staring at the turf and the weather, the crew have kept very busy taking care of getting all course accessories out onto the course. A fresh staining of various items, updating the look of our fairway entry/exit posts, and roping off numerous areas we would like to keep everyone out of for now have been a large focus. Last summer's drought has left some areas in the rough thin, and the cold and wet spring has left many of these spots saturated. Our spring staff numbers have increased with our contingent of University Students. They have been living in the bunkers putting a fresh edge in and moving and adding sand to get them in peak form a little earlier this year than we are usually able to. We have made great progress to this point and will be building off of that momentum over the next couple of weeks.