Vole Damage

Typical vole damage in rough (B. Guddat of NV from volecontrol.com)

Recently I was reading Golf Course Management magazine (GCM) and came across an interesting article titled Voles, voles and more voles!.  We have a serious problem on our golf course with voles due to the amount of undisturbed native areas around the golf course.  Every year since I have been at the golf course we have had some vole damage, ranging from dead trees to ruts across the rough and fairways.  With over 300 new trees planted on the golf course we have taken extra steps to try and prevent voles from eating the bark and roots of the trees.  In the fall we mow a 8 foot wide zone around every tree in the native down to a height of 2", then we spray an area 3' wide around each tree with roundup to kill all vegetation that is close to the tree trunk.  After reading the article in GCM I have come to realize that we will probably always have a vole problem, we just need to make sure we are doing everything we can to limit the damage.

What we do when there is snow on the gound.

There seems to be more going on in the maintenance shop during the winter than the summer

I always get the question from our golfers, what do you guys do when there is snow on the ground?  Even though there is not much work to be done outside there is always something for us to do inside.  This week we are working on refinishing the driving range dividers, painting the green traffic control blocks, and rebuilding the cutting units for our greens mowers.  We have a pretty full week worth of work when there are over 400 4x4x8 blocks that need to be cleaned, sanded, and painted and 26 range dividers that need to be sanded, stained, and re-spiked.