Well, It is now March and it has been a fairly mild winter so far. The maintenance staff has been very busy all winter working on clearing projects, tree pruning, weed and pre-emergent sprays to the entire course and cleaning up the landscape beds throughout the golf course. The course is very clean right now as far as winter weeds. There was some poa annua that our simazine did not kill left on some of the holes and we added Round-up to our Spring pre-emerge sprays of Ronstar. The Round-up has done a great job of controlling the rest of the poa on the course. Kudos go out to staff members Ben Parker and Eric Wolfgram for doing such a great job getting the couse sprayed out and clean.The bermudagrass looks good and healthy and with the mild winter and lots of rain we should see it break dormancy in great shape this spring. We are currently in the process of aerifying the greens for the first time this year. We will be using a machine called a Verti-drain that allows us to aerify deeper into the greens soil profile. This machine punches through the "pan layer" that forms below our normal aerification depth of approximately 4-5 inches. The Verti-drain can aerify to a depth of 12 inches and we are using a 7" x 5/8" tine to penetrate the pan layer to allow for better drainage and to relieve compaction. The front nine and practice green are complete and with the rain today we will have to complete the back nine greens on Wednesday. The greens should heal quickly with the help of Mother Nature. March is kind of a guess as to what kind of weather we will be dealing with here in North Carolina so here's hoping for some spring like weather during the next couple of weeks. We will also be finishing the chipping of the live oak limbs on holes 10 thru 17 as soon as it drys up enough to get the large chipper in to these areas. This past Saturday with the help of the forestry service we attempted to burn the 300 acres of marsh behind the club. Unfortunately the wind was not co-operating and we were only able to burn about 25 acres from the wooden bridge north to about 18 green. We will be re-evaluating the weather conditions this month to see if we can get the rest of that acerage burned safely.