Mark Hunt weather corner; 126 - Spring growth reality check
I always view spring as one of the most challenging times for golf course managers and groundsmen/women alike.
Pitches need converting from winter season format to cricket, greens need recovery from spring aeration, winter disease scarring and of course, for both, expectations rise along with day-time temperatures.
Some years, it appears like the seasons have been shunted forward on the calendar, autumn’s weather is shunted into winter and winter’s weather is shunted into spring.
In this article, I have used Uttoxeter as a location and collated the number of days when the night-time air temperature dropped below 1°C; in other words, a ground frost formed.
Here are the results for Spring 2025 and 2026 y.t.d
I accept it is a small data set, but we can see that January and March share a similar number of night frosts. The incidence of late frosts isn’t a new feature of our weather, but it does seem to be a recurring one. It also creates problems for the turf manager when they are trying to produce a surface in line with the seemingly ever-increasing level of expectation, fuelled by social media and by golf events like The Masters.
Let’s try and quantify the problem when it comes to growth.
From the stats above, we can see that spring 2026 to date has had fewer frosts than 2026, so presumably growth has been better, right?
Let’s define what ‘better’ actually represents.
To me, the most important metric is the number of good growth days. I define this as having a Daily Growth Potential (G.P) ≥ 0.4. It is worth noting that I would expect this number to equate to a healthy clip rate sufficient to promote recovery from aeration, disease damage, etc.
So, let’s look at the stats for our Uttoxeter location for this spring and graph/count the days when the Daily Growth Potential ≥ 0.4. What is also important is the number of consecutive days, as this translates to consistency of growth, which is another key metric.
Looking at the graph above, we can see that we picked up some consistently good growth this year from the 19th of February. Interestingly, that date also coincided with the commencement of good growth the previous year. Since then, it has been pretty hit and miss, with only 2 consecutive days of good growth in a row during March and April to date. Imagine if you aerated in the first week of March, which would be a normal-type date. Thereafter, I count a total of 7 days when the Daily G.P ≥ 0.4.
Now, I can tell you that is insufficient for recovery.
So, let’s manage expectations and communicate that whilst day-time temperatures might have everyone reaching for their t-shirts and shorts, grass isn’t always on the same page. Patience is therefore required before we can expect everything to be ‘fine and dandy’.
www.weatherstations.co.uk
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