False Spring

The warm days we experienced on March 9th to11th were a welcome change of pace. It has been a long time since we have had temperatures in the upper 60's at Ipswich. With the warm temperatures and some overnight rain/fog we melted a good deal of our snow pack. We still have a long way to go before we are snow and ice free at Ipswich. We do have a warm rain predicted for Monday, but after that it appears to be a long stretch of highs in the upper 30's to low 40's.

A gallery of pictures from March 13th (still a lot of meting to do)

As of Friday, March 13th we have very little turf exposed. What turf I do see at this point looks good. While early indications look promising, I still haven't been able to see the greens I would be most concerned with. Those would be greens 2,3,5,6,7,9, and 18. Due to their designs and locations they are very prone to developing ice. All these greens had two early bouts of severe ice over December and the early part of January. I did pull a few samples out of the third green and they are growing out nicely, but that is a very small sample size.

Things looking promising on the 13th and 15th greens:

At this point, I can't even make a prediction on when the course might open. The first step is to loose the remaining snow cover. Then I can accurately access turf conditions and will be able to come up with a ballpark idea and our target date. For now we must be patient and wait.

Tree work has started today (March 13th) to the 12th hole. The work should be finished by the end of the day today. Assistant Michael Curtin will update on the tree work with some before and after pictures as well as an explanation of the work in a blog post next week.