The Tarped Greens

Part of our winter preparation is to cover select greens with a special over-wintering tarp (see November 23 posting). We cover number 7 and 15 greens since these two have a history of developing ice most years. Ice is easier to break and remove from the greens surface when it is covered by an over-wintering tarp. If a green has a layer of ice and no cover to protect the surface there can be an increased chance of damaging the surface while trying to break up and remove the ice as well as exposing the turf to possible damage due to the continual freeze/thaw of the free water creating the ice. As mentioned in an older post, the tarps we used this year are slightly different than the tarps we have used in the past. These tarps have the ability to "breath" which is suppose to lessen the chance of anoxia (again, see Nov. 23 posting). The following is a brief description of the process required to remove the ice and get the tarp of the green surface in the spring.

Ice Layer Over Tarp

Although the ice on 15 green was never any thicker than a couple inches is was still too thick to remove the entire surface with just shovels.

Aerator Breaking Ice

We used the aerator to shatter the ice and then used shovels to remove ice chunks from the tarp and ploughed the ice off the surface with the bobcat.

Bobcat, Aerator, and Shovels

The whole process took 2 guys one complete day to finish. My concern of the thin ice layer that I observed over the winter appears, at least for 15 green, to be unfounded since the surface appeared unharmed when we pulled back the tarp. Once the surface has dried and the grass begins to grow we will then know how the grass overwintered.

Exposed 15 Green

One Green......

When I'm unsure of how a green may doing under the snow I go out and expose a section of turf and pull a plug (see Feb. 26 posting). Number one green was showing an unusual color as the snow melted on the front left corner. I took a plug and put inside a window at room temperature to see what was what.

February 26

There is times when the turf under snow retains some of its green color but with the cold, freezing fall temperatures the turf usually turns brown. There is a problem if the turf is still brown 7 days later:

March 5

It's really bad news when things look the same after 14 days:

March 13

After one week I decided to remove all the snow cover from #1 green so we could get a better look at the entire surface and try gain some control by double tarping the green to get things growing sooner than normal.

Snow cover before removal

Snow removed with Bobcat in 20 minutes



Only a very thin ice layer



Spreading material to speed melt



Melt after one day



Tarped over ice for first night



The rest melted on day 2

This green will remain tarped for the rest of the month and depending on how it looks at the beginning of April it may stay tarped until recovery is satisfactory. Over the next couple weeks the weather will dictate any strategies we take to speed the recovery. The big unknown is how many more greens are like this one? Until I can get a look at all the greens I can't really say why #1 has a problem. My suspicion is we may see issues on those surfaces with a large percentage of Poa annua that are susceptible to freezing early and hard because of micro-climates (i.e. poor light and high soil moisture). It is still early and despite the lack of snow we have to be cautious about exposing surfaces to cold temperature, especially if we don't have enough tarps to protect the surfaces. This coming week we will most likely tackle #7 and #15 to see what is under the overwintering tarps.

Snow Melting Experiment

A bunch of different things have happened over time to make me want to rid the golf course of snow quicker than usual. 1) I received a broucher in the mail a while back promoting the idea of using black sand to speed the melting of snow (assuming it is always sunny!). 2.) The possible threat of not re-registering a product we depend on for snow mold control. 3.) The development of a "biological" snow mold control. 4.) The increasing costs of fungicides. 5.) The push to be more "environmental"

First a little primer on snow mold: I'll generalize a bit but most of the winter disease on KGC is either gray or pink snow mold. Both diseases survive the summer as a spore within the thatch layer. The spores germinate in the fall and grow under snow cover (especially when there is plenty of snow over unfrozen, wet ground). A level of control is achieved by applying fungicides in the fall that limit growth of the germinating spores. Some fungicide efficacy is lost over the winter allowing for the development snow mold in the early spring. The decreasing control is one of the reasons why we blow snow off the greens if we think the disease pressure is high.

Greens will never be able to overwinter without some form of chemical disease control. However, with our fairways there is a greater "buffer" to handle some level of disease. The surface area is substantially larger (the fairway area on #16 alone is equal to the total area of the greens), some grass species (fescues and Kentucky blue grass) that exist on our fairways are somewhat resistant to snow molds as compared to the mostly Poa annua species on the greens which has no disease resistance, and the fairways can handle a little more abuse because they are maintained at a height of cut (3/4 " for fairways vs. 5/32" on greens) that allows them to recover quicker from winter damage.


If we can melt the snow and get the turf surface to dry quicker we will have less incidence of disease. The picture on the left shows about 7 to 8 inches of snow on the driving range. We ploughed a series of roads so we would be able to spread the sand on top of the snow.

The picture on the right shows how much snow melted after 7 days. Temperatures ranged from -10 at night to +9 during the day with mostly sunny conditions. If you double click on the pictures you get a better idea of how much melted in a short time. We will use this for melting the small amounts of snow left on our greens in the spring when we think it is appropriate.

We will see how quick the exposed areas on the range green up to the area we left the snow on. With a few other techniques (such as dethatching) we may be able to lessen the severity of winter disease damage on areas such as the fairways.