The soil at the course, and most of the surrounding area is a silty clay that holds moisture as well as your morning coffee cup. The daily fog and heavy dew does not help to dry the place out and the only time the wind blows, it is followed or proceeded by rain. As I look out the shop bay door right now, the tree tops are swaying, and yes, rain is on the way.

Mowing in these conditions is another judgement call that decides between a risk of smashing the turf into muddy soil or keeping off all traffic and allowing the grass to get very long. In a perfect world, the top 6 inches of soil would drain well and dry up after a couple of days, but this is not a perfect world. After two weeks of waiting, we need to cut what we can and clean up the mess.

The fairways have improved year after year with sand topdressing and aerfication. The difference each year is small, but the cumulative effect is growing. This year we will aerify the fairways with solid tines as soon as they are dry enough to handle the equipment. In June we will pull cores and in September we will pull cores again and topdress.

In the future, I hope to start topdressing twice as much on fairways to work some sand and pore space into the soil profile. The difference each year would be small, but the cumulative effect............. Are you seeing a trend here?