April 30th 2026 | West Hills Golf

West Hills

Fredericton

Hey folks,

Just a short update for those of you wondering how we’re making out. As you can imagine with the weather in the past few weeks progress has been slow, but there has been progress. There’s been enough heat and decent days for us to see the actual damage on the golf course from the winter.

It appears that anything with a North facing slope suffered damage from ice not melting through out the winter. Number 3, 5 ,7, 6, 12, 13, and 17 all took damage to an extent, with 3 being the worst. 14 Green also took some damage but mostly related to being in the micro climate surrounded by trees. Most of the damage is population reduction, meaning the greens are thin and coverage is sporadic. This is less difficult to recover as the the existing plants will shelter the seedlings and speed up the process. In addition, turf always recovers faster vegetatively so sporadic growth is something we can work with.

To date we have seeded the weak areas three times, once a week since the ground has thawed. Each week our process is to remove the black mats, over seed the weak areas, mow, top dress, fertilize and apply fungicides. We then replace the mats and irrigate. So far the germination rate has been low, but with temperatures in the minuses at night and only a few nice days that’s not really a surprise. The idea is that the layering of seed applications will blanket the weak areas and eventually, when we gets some help weather wise, there will be a burst of activity.

I took some videos of the course this week and at this point it looks pretty dismal, but its still early and cold, but we will have the course back into shape as the weather changes to help us.

First the worst. This an aerial of 3 green. From the shape of the damaged areas it easy to see that the ice sat in the lower portions of the of the green and caused the turf to be encased. This is by far the worst of the greens, where I would estimate a 60 percent loss. The other greens are certainly less damaged than this. We also believe that the deep frost from this year caused the drain system in the green to freeze and prevented any water from leaving the site, something we intend to remedy this fall.

Here’s number One green, which effectively came out perfect. It has southern exposure, trees around the back to bounce heat off and very little wind.

And here’s a wide shot of 18 fairway, definitely the most damaged on the course. As you can see the tree line to the south of the fairway prevented a lot of the snow and ice from melting though out the winter, as well as froze most of the drain systems. It was also seed on Thursday so stay tuned to see how it progresses.

Soil temperatures are just at the beginning of the growth scale so progress should be evident soon.

The seed has begun to germinate but not at the scale we are happy with. Given just a few more degrees we should see some benefits!

As Brett had mentioned we still haven’t arrived at an opening date. The main metric for that decision will be the rate of recovery, which will be dictated by the weather. I’m expecting with the amount of seed we have out, the current soil temperatures, the precipitation and raw unadulterated belief, next week will bring significate changes. Stay tuned for more updates!