Turning boards for mowing greens

We are now using turning boards when mowing greens. We started using them in the fall and will keep using them through the winter and early spring. This should help reduce the amount of sod work that must be done around greens due to wear from mowing greens in the winter.  The mowers take 4 boards each and they lay them at each side of the green and turn the mower on them after each pass. This keeps the mower off of the turf while turning. After about 6 or 8 passes they must stop and move the boards over and then continue on. This did add some time to the mowing process but we have found that we can use 5 mowers and get done in the same amount of time that it takes when we normally use 4. This is not a problem in the fall and winter when the rest of the golf course is slowing down and we can use more guys to focus on things like this. Below are a few pictures of the guys using the boards.

Rye Tees

The rye tees came up nicely. It only took a few short weeks before we were able to get the first cut on them. The picture below is one of the first cuts that we put on the tees.

Wet Start to the Winter

It has been a while since our last post because there have been a lot of new things going on around the Great Waters maintenance department. I have been taking many pictures of projects and routine maintenance items that we have been getting done over the last few months and I am going to try to get a few of them uploaded over the next few days. A quick update on the amount of rainfall we have had lately, over 3.5" of rain has fallen since right before Thanksgiving. This does not sound like much compared to the massive amounts of rain that we were getting in the spring but it has just been a cold wet drizzle most of the time so it has not been the best working conditions to get anything done on a golf course. However, we are pushing through it and getting a few projects done here and there.