Seed. Seed. More Seed.

We have had several consecutive years of interesting weather.  Hum.  Ok.  Maybe I should use the word challenging.  In 2010, we had more water than we knew what to do with.  It basically rained every single day. On 6 separate days, we had to close the course.  When you really only have about 100 days of being open a year, 6 days is nearly 10%!  Lots of grass was lost and we planted nearly 14,000 pounds of grass seed.

In 2011, we had 1/2 of a year with non-stop rain and then the rain stopped.  The end of 2011 was the beginning of a drought.  That brought us to 2012.  The year of the drought.  First time in our 40 years of business that we basically ran out of water.  Man, it was tough to watch our golf course lose its color and beauty over something that was completely out of our control.

That leads us to the spring of 2013.  We have high hopes.  Our ponds are full and the rain has been a welcome sight.  It truly is amazing how well the golf course came through the drought, but there are many bare spots.This spring we have planted lots of grass seed.  On number 9 tee box, we have bentgrass because it is a tee that gets pretty beat up because it is a short par 3.  Bentgrass does a better job at filling in quickly.  It is also a low lying tee box which makes it challenging to keep grass growing on it, too.  Bentgrass likes warm weather to germinate.  To keep things warm, we cover the tee box to help with germination.

At the end of the year in 2012, we had to stop watering tees in order to keep enough water around to continue to water greens.  Just typing about last year makes my stomach turn.  Anyway, we got to work this spring planting seed on number nine tee box.

We covered it up with its little blankie.

I don’t blame that tee box.  I like a nice warm blankie to keep me warm, too.  When I was a little kid, I had a special blankie.  I loved on that blankie so much that it basically fell apart. My sister would tie all the bits of blankie together for me until my blankie was about 10 feet long.

How about you?  Did you sleep with a blankie?  Do you like to play golf when it is cold or warm?