Winter like start to spring
As you are probably aware the golf course is slow to recover from winter. We have a few winter bare areas from traffic in wet conditions, the tees are still showing wear from play back of last year and most importantly the greens still showing the winter colour and are not growing much to aid any recovery. This year since the wet weather retreated in January we was hit with a barrage of snow and ice for a month in February/March and now April is the driest coldest month on record. We have currently recorded 21 frosts in April alone. The cold night temperatures are fooling the grass into thinking we are still in winter. Plants need to take the suns energy and convert C02 and water into sugars and oxygen essentially and a lot of this process happens at night when the plant has collected maximum energy from the sun. When you have half decent day temperatures but freezing by night this process stops or slows down. We plant growers use something called growing degree days (GDD) to see whe