Late Fall Greens Aeration

I seem to have caught a few of the members off guard this year with my late fall greens aeration. This is something that I have done for the past 3 years on our putting greens. It usually goes unnoticed as the weather is usually terrible in November. This year I did it on November 14.

I punch the greens in the late fall and sometimes in the late winter with 3" long 3/8" diameter solid tines. These tines don't take a core out like we do every spring and fall.

There are two reasons I aerate this time of year. The first is to increase drainage on the greens to help keep them as dry as possible. We often see large volumes of rain and puddling is a concern as well as ice if it gets cold out. Last night the course received about 1" of rain and there wasn't a single puddle on any of our putting greens! Ideally we would aerate deeper but our current equipment only allows us to punch holes 3" deep.

The second reason I aerate in the late fall is to help increase the soil-air gas exchange. With all the rain in the winters our soils often become anaerobic and black-layer can become a problem. The aeration helps open up the soil and allows the it to "breathe". The disruption to play is usually minimal and the holes should be more or less covered by the end of the week. The pay-off from this process is a healthier plant and better playing conditions in the spring!

Turfgrass speedo is still my most important tool for managing turf growth after 4 years.

It wasn't the easiest year for growing grass , but the conditions were still pretty good. Almost 4 years ago exactly, I came up with the idea of comparing actual clipping yields to the "ideal" clipping yield or the clipping yield adjusted using the Growth Potential Model . Since then, it has proved to be a much more useful tool to manage growth than I originally thought . It has been almost a decade since I started making observations on plant health and playability and how it relates to the clipping yield. I have been constantly searching for ways to get the growth rate right as often as I can and this tool seems to be the best way I have seen so far, and might ultimately, be the best way going forward. To prove this point I will discuss in a future post, the success I've had with pest control in the past few years (for the most part (Not withstanding the times where I think my greens are dead but they actually aren't...thanks T)). Never needed less There are

Do you have enough?

I recently discussed how we can use fertilizer ratios to simplify how much fertilizer we apply to help us keep above the MLSN guidelines . When we get a soil test done it is a static amount of nutrients found in the soil. Even if you are above the MLSN guidelines at the time of testing, it doesn't guarantee that you will remain at or above the guidelines as the grass grows and consumes nutrients. There is math that you can use to determine exactly how much nutrient you need to apply to ensure that you remain at or above the MLSN guidelines. For many, this is much too complicated. For that reason I made a quick cheat sheet to help you determine how much of each nutrient you can expect to use each year based off a few different annual nitrogen rates. Nutrient use is based primarily on nitrogen use so the left 2 columns are a few different nitrogen rates. The columns for each nutrient are in PPM and are designed to help you look at your current soil test PPM (mehlich 3) and determin

How to quantify nutrient content in liquid fertilizer

In a recent post, I discussed how it was actually cheaper to spray soluble vs granular fertilizer. What about if we use pre-mixed liquid fertilizer? How do we even figure out how much nutrient we are applying with pre-mixed liquid fertilizer? Before I learned that you could simply dissolve soluble fertilizer in water and apply it in a sprayer, I was a big user of pre-mixed liquid fertilizers. One of the issues I initially had was figuring out exactly how much of each nutrient I was applying. The math wasn't as straightforward is it was with granular fertilizers. It turns out, it's actually not that difficult but requires an extra step. First, we need to convert the liquid volume into a mass. Many products will have the product density displayed on the label or you can look in the Safety Data Sheet (SDS) for that information as well. No SDS? Should you be using products without an SDS? Even if this information isn't included on the label it is very easy to figure out. All

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