Hello Spring!

The weather turned nice just in time for Easter and I think it was close to 70 degrees for the egg hunt.  If your thinking these two girls had a great time with the bunny, you're right.  If you're also thinking these two girls are cuter than average, I would have to agree and it's not just because they are my own............they really are this cute.  Anyway the egg hunt was great fun with awesome weather and everyone at the Clubhouse did a fantastic job with the brunch.

With great weather comes great ambitions on the golf course.  Our staff at the Green Department has grown by 5 full time people in just the last week so now we finally feel like we can do more than just keep things mowed.  It's time to get things wrapped up in preparation for the upcoming season so we are going strong to get all the stump areas backfilled and seeded.  You might remember that we lost over 25 trees this past winter and that was in addition to the 20+ trees we removed in the fall.  That's a lot of stump holes to repair. Below you see the rough grade of the cart path removal project on 12 tee.  Last fall we removed 7 trees in this area to increase sunlight to the putting surface of the 11th green, and then the ice storm took out another 9 trees so we have lots of nice sunlight to grow healthy turf and lots of space for traffic to disperse so we feel like there is no need for a cart path anymore.

Here's what it looks like now and we are basically ready to sod it which should happen next week.

Speaking of sod, this morning we finally wrapped up the drainage project in front of the seventh green by using some fairway sod we took from areas on #7 and #8 which will now be rough.  You can see here that my staff did a great job with the sod work and if you look close you can see there is also something going on at the back of the 7th green. 

  

Here is Doug, Tim, and Dustin working on the back of #7.  This area will be a huge run off of the green and will be mowed short like the collar or fairway.  This year we will be adding several run offs and run ons around the greens per our newly adopted master plan.  Our newly adopted master plan will be the subject of my next post since it is a huge deal and very exciting stuff.

Anyway, this run-off behind number 7 green is quite large.  In fact it is so large that part of it is a run-on since the short turf will go half way up the big mound back left of the green.  It should make for some interesting golf this year around the 7th green and it's only possible because we removed the large fir that once stood here.  Can't wait to see how this turns out.