Winters in Saskatchewan are harsh, but they can be especially hard on the province's over 300 golf courses.  Our three local courses, the Lynbrook, Hillcrest and Deer Ridge, are working hard right now to get ready for the cold and snow that will hit with winter.

“Knock on wood, winter has been very good for us over the last 10, or 12 years, every since we had the incident killing the greens,” said Owen Morhart, the Lynbrook's superintendent of maintenance.  “Winter's have been very nice for us, so no complaints from me.”

There's lots that goes into getting a golf course ready for the long, cold months ahead and Morhart says the most important part is protecting the greens, “We've do some fungicide spraying so we don't get snow mold on the greens and basically let everything grow as long as we can.  Then we put some sand down and tarps to cover our greens.

“We let the greens grow out a little longer, let the roots establish a little better because as we're cutting it short, we're cutting that right around the five millimetre mark, so of course we're stressing everything out, so we let it grow longer that way the roots have more time to get healthier before the winter freeze up.”

With the end of the golf season near, Morhart says they've been working over the last few weeks to get ready for the snow to fall, “We started with pulling out with our pumps and then we'll blow out all our water lines and next week we'll give our third application of fungicide and sand and put the tarps down, so should take a week to a week and a half.”

Once the snow is on the ground, the work isn't done.  Morhart says they will do checks throughout the winter to make sure the greens aren't getting damaged, “When we can get to them, we check them, but everything gets pretty froze down, so it's more of a hope and pray kind of situation.”

The Lynbrook is still accepting tee times until Sunday, while the season wrapped up at the Hillcrest on Monday and Deer Ridge is done as well.