Turf Care Blog – February, 2016
Welcome to The Links at Brunello – Turf Care Blog. Here, we will keep you up to date with the golf course maintenance taking place throughout the year and help you understand the purpose of some of our maintenance practices and their importance in keeping the golf course healthy while at a high standard of play.
While it may be the middle of winter, we have been busy over the past couple months with a number of projects to provide some winter activities to the community. These include building our skating rink on the tennis courts by the main parking lot and #10 tee, grooming trails for cross country skiing & snowshoeing, and continuing our tree cleaning project.
As the season came to a close in the Fall last year we continued to clear out trees out around landing areas to help golfers locate their balls more easily. We focused primarily on the #12 and #13, clearing out areas along the fairways and behind the greens. Hopefully this helps golfers find their balls and helps keep the speed of play up in the coming season. This will also allow of the trees we left to grow healthier by taking away the weaker trees that compete for sunlight and soil nutrients.
In December we built a frame for the rink inside the tennis courts anticipating we would be able to get started on making ice before the holidays. However, Mother Nature wasn’t on our side and provided us with another mild December. Fortunately we had a bit of a deep freeze during the week of January 18th where we got the right temperatures to make some ice and began flooding the rink. Once established, we have since been able to hot flood the rink much like a Zamboni to maintain a smooth ice surface for skating. This will be done on a daily basis so long as the weather permits us to have the water freeze over. Additionally we have cleared some snow off of the pond on #4 hole (access via Timberlea Village where Hampshire Crest. and Yorkshire Dr. meet) to make room for more skating surface and where hockey will be permitted to play. While it appears that we are in store for some milder temperatures this winter, we ask that you be patient with us should we have to close the rink during these times, not only is it for your safety but the quality of ice could be compromised if we permitted skating during these times.
The cross country ski trails are currently being worked on as we have partnered up with the Nova Scotia Cross Country Ski Association to help assist us with grooming these trails. We will be out there moving snow around and towing our trail groomer when the conditions are right, which may mean us being out there in the evening. The trails will follow along our cart paths and offer multiple routes, whether you’d like to ski the whole 18 holes or just a few holes we will have something that you can enjoy. Again with the warmer temperatures there’s only so much we can do until we get some snow and colder weather.
If you are out snow shoeing we welcome you to explore the course but we ask that you to stay off the greens, tees, and fairways while you are out there, and try to walk along side the cart paths. The compact snow will turn to ice damage the grass beneath come Spring time when we are trying to open the course for play. This is why we fence off our greens during the winter months as they are the most important part of the golf course and why we try to divert traffic away from them.
One last reminder, should you see us driving around in any of our utility vehicles or tractors we ask that you step off to the side at least 5-10 feet just for safety concerns, sometimes a small patch of ice can cause our equipment to slip and we may not have control of where it slides to. We appreciate your cooperation and hope to see you out there!
Until next time!
Johnny Connor,
2nd Assistant & Environmental Steward