The cold front has been everything the news channels had said it would be. The past two mornings, we have registered temperatures of 24 degrees. I woke up Tuesday and thought I was back in Michigan. I guess now matter how far you go, you can never escape where you come from.Fortunately, our frost delays haven't been that bad. We delayed the golfers an hour and twenty minutes on Tuesday and 20-30 minutes on Wednesday. A lot of people ask why we don't get frost damage from sending the players out early and I have only thoughts as to the answer.
My first thought is the type of bent grass we have on our greens. We have A-4, which through genetic modifications, is much hardier than others at low temperatures. My other thought is our fertilizer program. Two of the staples of our program are Iron and Potassium. Both fertilizers help to strengthen the cells inside the leaf which make the plant more tolerant to the traffic stress during frost periods.
The other item you may hear Scott Hoyt, GM, or myself say is that we have never seen a foursomes dollar value worth of damage. Yes, the greens may get a bit thinner in the winter and we may see some frost damage from driving on the grass, but not enough to keep golfers off.
