Thank You For a Great Season!

Thank you to all our customers for another great year and for your support. The season brought a early and warm spring a good summer and ended with a great November.

We appreciate those who attended our fall members meeting. We had some good discussion about all areas of the operation. I will recap a few things from the meeting and the year.

Trees- Our main project was to continue to remove Ash trees in the fall. I am surprised how many customers have never heard of the Emerald Ash Borer despite our communication efforts and the articles in the paper as the city works to remove 5,000 trees in public property with more than that on private property. The state of Wisconsin has over 25,000,000 ash trees. So we are not alone in our tree removal work.
At Rolling Meadows we started with 386 ash trees in play and removed 40 in previous years, 40 this past summer and over 100 this fall. Holes 4, 16, 19 and 25 are the most affected. Most of our green and white ash are at the end of their useful life with our without the ash borer and were becoming brittle and dangerous.
We choose to remove these older trees rather than treat them but if you have a better ash tree in your yard I would not wait to treat it. 
They say the least expensive day in a trees life is the day it is planted. The same goes for labor. The most labor intensive part of the process is stump grinding, cleanup, regrading and seeding or sodding. After getting prices from contractors we are doing most of the work in-house to remove them economically.
We did hear a lot of comments about how bare the course looks and we do agree it does look different. However different is not bad and on most holes removing the trees has brought out the land forms and contours of the property. You had a beautiful and challenging golf course before we starting removing ash trees and you will have a beautiful and challenging golf course when we are done removing ash trees. We are planning to start a tree planting program in late 2016 with a opportunity for golfers to donate if they want.

Closing - The last die-hards played on Nov 20th and the weather quickly went downhill from there. We were the last in the city to close but realize their are area courses that stay open later if not all winter when the weather allows. We are often asked why we do not stay open all winter as some courses do. The two main are:

1. Our clay soils to are not conducive to allowing winter play as we can hold a layer of water at the surface that is not fun to play and and could traffic on the saturated soil may cause damage.
2. We apply a heavy load of sand to the greens after we close to protect them desiccation due to winter winds. The layer of sand produces better putting next year but does reduce putting quality now. We think it is better for us to close and sand the greens for better putting next year. 

Then of course the economics of staying open for a couple customers a day just do not make sense. Hopefully with the predicted El Nino winter spring will come early to the Midwest and we will be on the links before you know it.

Winter work - We have started our winter maintenance on equipment and the buildings to prepare for 2016. Now is the time to find and fix all the little things to reduce downtime during the season.

Thank you again for your business in 2015 and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Hopefully we will see green grass again in March.