Stupid winter choices I feel I force myself to make.....

We're well on our way into winter now. Over the past week temps are getting to low -20's and staying well below zero during the day which is what I wanted to slow any disease development. We had a bit of snow (4 to 5 cm) this past Sunday night which is providing a bit of token cover. However that snow is the sh*tty part and reason for the title of this post. It has forced me to clean off 15 green so I could lay out tarp. 

Anxiety Inducing Snow Plow Job

 I know I said I would clean off snow on the problem greens if needed but in my mind I was only doing that as long as the ground was not frozen.  Once things set up I planned to keep the snow cover. I've been watching forecasts and I have shoveled, by hand, the small skiffs of snow for all the reasons mentioned in the last post. The part I'm unsure of is the type of impact plowing snow on frozen ground will have. Every spring this paragraph from an old USGA article plays in my head:

Traffic damage on frozen turf areas usually occurs during periods of freezing or thawing. The most devastating situation occurs when the grass blades and the upper one-half to one inch of soil has thawed, but the ground beneath their level remains frozen. Traffic will create a shearing action of the roots, rhizomes, and crown tissues at this time. This is comparable to cutting the plant tissue from the underlying root system with a sod cutter. Complete kill of leaves, crowns, and rhizomes can occur if the temperatures soon drop below 20° F. Symptoms from this severe injury include whitish to dark brown leaves that may mat on the surface. 

There was no way the top inch was thawed with a high of -2 for that day but I can tell you there was lots of sheared off grass blades. My hunch/hope is what I saw was mostly leaf tips. 

Neil L. plow did work really well and I believe I would use it again but, depending on results this coming spring, I may want to do a heavy sand top dressing as further protection from the plow blade.