Patience Pays Off

We've received alot of questions lately, as the weather has become more conducive for regular golf, about the conditioning of the greens. Specifically:

- What are those green splotches, and when are you going to do something about them?
- The greens are slow...when will they be faster?
- When will the areas sodded last fall be less spongy?

There are many answers and long explanations to go with each of these questions, but the simple and best answer is: When it's time.

It's tough this time of year to be patient. The sun is out, flowers are blooming, everyone can sense things in nature starting to wake up. And it's the same with our grasses. We have very well thought out plans in place, ready to enact, to combat our issues and improve the courses' playability. But we have to be patient. Because the majority of our plans involve getting aggressive and doing some form of temporary damage to our greens, either by verticutting, aerating, lowering mowing heights, chemical applications, sand topdressing, etc. And the last thing anyone wants is to do damage to the greens, even for the sake of making them better in the long run, and to run into some temperamental weather and have to wait far too long for the grass to grow out of the injury inflicted on it.

Think of it like this: if you start feeling "under the weather" in the winter, maybe you catch a fever, a cough, you just don't feel yourself. You can tell your immune system is a little compromised. So is our grass's growing ability slightly compromised by the colder weather. And if you stay home and get rest and eat well, perhaps you feel a bit better after a day or so. But if you get impatient, and go out and push through 36 holes of golf in a day, you'll more than likely end up right back in your bed, feeling miserable. Whereas if you just waited another day or two to make a full recovery, you'd be able to pull of 36 holes AND shoot below your handicap!

Our grass is slowly waking up, and while it's not quite at 100% recovery yet, if we're patient just long enough, we can be as aggressive as we want, and the grass will pull through with shining colors and be all the better because of it.