Slowly, very slowly the snow is disappearing from around the course. Those greens that I sped up the melt on are all open and appeared to have wintered well. Realistically, an official "we are good" comment won't come until I start to see some growth but I am in an optimistic mood. I still haven't removed the tarp on 15 green but I am at the mop up stage and the tarp should be off soon. I did get 7 Green cleaned off and was able to look under the tarp and saw how it wintered.
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| 7 Green |
Similar to last year (go
HERE) I messed around with the Enkamat product and saw positive results. In the picture above the upper left corner of the green was covered with just an ice shield alone while the obviously greener turf was covered with both Enkamat and ice shield. As I've said in earlier posts we didn't really have any ice this year so the ice shield wasn't necessarily required but based on this picture it would be tough to ignore the benefits of the Enkamat.
If you remember last fall I also used Enkamat under the semi-permeable tarp on 6 green ( go
HERE for reminder) and, as luck would have it, the results were similar.
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| 6 Green |
As usual, the picture somewhat distorts how the turf really appears but trust me when I say it wintered well. Aside from trying to give the weak part of this green a head start I also wanted to see the impact of the Enkamat in conditions other than under an impermeable (i.e. ice, slush, and water). Again, it's tough to ignore the apparent benefits.
One final experiment I did with the Enkamat was using it directly on a green surface without any cover to see if results were similar to last year. The green was 9 but it still has snow so we'll have to wait to see what has occurred.
For the next week or so I will shuffle tarps around to those greens which appear slow to get going and start to clean up a few loose ends in anticipation of the Spring Volunteer Clean-Up and, dare I say, opening!
