Have you ever heard of lawn bowling? I hadn’t either until I started working at Little Miami Golf Center. Lawn bowling has roots as far back as 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. The Romans introduced the game to Europe, and in 1209 the Southampton Old Bowling Green Club was established in England. In 1864 a […]

When I tell people that I report to work at 6 a.m., I get a range of reactions from wild disbelief to groans of “I could never…” Admittedly, it takes a little adjusting to get up before 5 a.m. And like most modern human beings, I do my adjusting with coffee. In Great Parks’ Operations […]

Over the past five years, the emerald ash borer (EAB) beetle has had a devastating impact on our local forests. To protect the people in the parks, Great Parks had to take down thousands of dead and dying ash trees. Although the number of trees felled is depressing, we have taken a proactive approach to […]

Are Great Parks’ golf courses going green AND brown this year? Actually, it may be both. This year, Little Miami Golf Center and Meadow Links & Golf Academy began experimenting with different methods of planting zoysia grass on select fairway areas. The goal is to see firsthand how this quirky grass can help us in […]

Summer is here, and it’s getting hot! On the golf course, high temperatures and dry soils equal stressed out grass. To the untrained eye, running a sprinkler head is the only way to keep it alive this time of year, but that’s not the case. Fortunately, the golf course industry continues to find smarter ways […]

The impact that the emerald ash borer (EAB) has had on our forests and landscapes is painfully obvious, even to a casual observer. This tiny bug is responsible for many of the dead spots you can now see in our local canopy. Not surprisingly, a significant amount of Great Parks’ resources in recent years has […]

Canada geese are a pretty common site in Great Parks. Lots of lakes and greenspace provide a perfect spot for these large gray-bodied birds to raise their young. But the geese aren’t completely protected, and still have to be on the watch against cars, people, predators and other dangers. Each spring, Canada geese break into […]

My first full-time position with Great Parks was in Landscape Operations way back in 1984. Even after many, many years in park and golf course maintenance, I can still say with total honesty (and a significant amount of pride) that those months I spent on the landscape crew involved some of the hardest, most challenging […]