As alluded to in the last post, this time of year is tricky. Early in the week the weather forced my hand and I had to make a choice. The rain and the "warmish" weather did a number on the snow cover on the certain greens.
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| 2 Green, November 19th |
The greens on the front that can be difficult are covered with impermeable tarps and look like this:
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| 1 Green Tarp |
For both these situations there was not enough cover to worry about ice formation but
only because the ground is not frozen. In this situation, however:
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| 4 Green |
I was slightly more concerned. Ice could become a problem if the temperature dropped significantly so we blew the snow off of #4, #5, #10, #18, and #8 greens with the hope of "managing" ice formation (the upper putting green, 2, and 3 greens basically melted while 1, 6, 7 and 9 all had some sort of tarp on their surface). As I've mentioned, blowing snow opens surfaces up to the potential of freezing so it is sort of a risk but the quantity of moisture in the snow pack (wet slush) for those greens forced me to make a decision. Luckily, those greens only remained exposed for a couple days and never froze. We now have close to 4" of snow on the front greens and no sign of any ice on the greens we cleared.
The back greens (other than 10, 18 and 17) had more snow so I decided not to blow those greens. To be honest, we really did not have enough time to clean them anyways. I went out today and looked and saw 4" fresh snow over a plate glass layer of ice over an inch of corn snow over unfrozen ground. That says to me leaving those greens may have been O.K. but it is early and my crystal ball doesn't look any farther ahead than to my next meal so, like I said, "All bets are off".
