Up and Down Temperatures

The extremely cold weather looks like it is going to continue over the next couple of days at least. What a change it is this morning from yesterday! Yesterday our high temperature was close to 60 degrees and today our high is forecast to be around 15 degrees with wind chills around -15 degrees, a huge difference in just 12 hours of time. I have had a few questions about how the golf course is fairing through these extremely cold temperatures that we have had over the last month or so. My gut feeling is that everything looks and seems to be OK at this point. However the more ups and downs we have and the more traffic we have on the dormant Zoysia grass fairways causing injury the more susceptible we are to winter kill. This is one of those touchy issues and is a lot like gambling in the Casino. You can roll the dice and continue to take your chances with cart damage which is what we are doing or you can eliminate cart traffic on the fairways and go to cart path only. At this time however I don't think we have any areas that are showing signs of damage from cart traffic. We will continue to monitor the situation as the winter season continues. One thing I would like everyone's help with especially with the cold temperatures we have been having is honor our "cart path only signs" that we do have on a few of our fairways. We are doing this to allow some of these areas to recover from all the golf cart stress that they incurred in 2013. Hopefully with your help and some help from "Mother Nature" this spring these areas will recover quickly for the 2014 season. It looks like the beginning of the week the crew will be inside continuing to work on some projects hopefully finishing up most of them. As the temperatures improve over the week we will move outside and continue on the irrigation installation between #6 & #7, installing stone along cart paths, and removal of a few more dead trees around the golf course. I hope you all had a great weekend and were able to get outside yesterday and enjoy some nice warm weather at your homes or here on the golf course!