Soil Temps are On The Rise

Weather conditions have continued to stay rather mild over the past couple of days. We had a little moisture over the weekend in the form of a little rain and then some sleet and snow followed by cold temperatures in the low 20s. The turf has started to wake up a little bit over the last week or so but the cold temperatures at night and last weekend have slowed this process down a little bit. However we are still mowing greens about 2 times a week right now and are getting a fair amount of clippings which means the bentgrass is growing which is great news. I took soil temperatures today and they read around the 45 degree mark. They say that the turf really doesn't start to do anything until soil temperatures hit the 50 degree mark for a couple days in row. Like I said though we have been getting a good amount of clippings in our mowing so I think it is just around the corner before things really break loose and start to grow. This is good news as I think the greens will be growing nicely for our greens aerification on April 7th and 8th. As you can see in the picture below there is a fair amount of green starting to peek through on our greens. There have been some questions as to why our greens are slower to green up then others around the area. Well this is due to the variety of bentgrass that our greens are which is A4 bentgrass. It is traditionally slow to wake up but then does better then some of the others in the heat of the summer meaning it is more of a warm season variety then some of the other varieties of bentgrass that are at other clubs in the area. Today we were finally able to get all the irrigation charged up and ready to go. The cold winter temperatures made things a little more difficult in recharging the lines as we had some irrigation heads freeze a bit and we had to wait on them to thaw or repair the broken parts before we could fully pressurize the lines.