Blowing Snow

Typically, seeing a headline as this would mean greens are being cleared and golf is shortly around the corner. However, this winter has not brought average weather and therefore this is not your typical snow blowing.  Having roughly only an inch of snow in some areas on the greens and others that are bare right down to the tarp, we figured we would try an experiment to produce our own snow in order to increase the insulation value. Typically blown snow becomes quite hard packed and in some cases actually forms a bond to the turf or the tarp which is undesireable, however, with the temperature soaring to plus six last Tuesday the result by Thursday was a very hard "crust" layer on top of the snow.  By having the crust on top, we decided this may be a good time to test this theory as the snow blown onto the green would just stay on top of the crust and not form any sort of bond.  On Thursday we hauled five loads of snow from the local hockey rink which was spread out around the green surround and a snow blower was used to blow the snow onto the desired areas.  We will be monitoring conditions such as snow compaction, bonds created with existing snow, bonds created with the tarps, and the insulation value that was created. Determining the insulation value will be done by monitoring crown temperatures under the area where the snow was blown versus and area where it was not.