New Year, A New Name

Finding a suitable name for this blog has always been a challenge of mine. At first it was titled "Pender Harbour Greenkeeper" but this name lost its meaning when the focus of the blog changed from course condition updates to alternative turf disease management techniques and observations. As the blog focus shifted I wanted to disassociate my golf course name from what I write about. It became less about the golf course and more about the trial and error of maintenance practices. Seeing a picture of a wildly out of control fusarium outbreak is also not what I wanted golfers searching for my course to see! I briefly changed the name to Jayturf’s blog but that had little meaning to me.

Not what golfers want to see when they search for
Pender Harbour Golf.

It wasn't until I was on an 800 km trip back from Christmas Holidays that I came up with a good name for the blog. My wife and I were listening to a Ted Talk podcast about Hacking.

Most people think about computer criminals when they hear the term "Hacker." Over the years the meaning of "hacker" has changed to reflect someone who does "interesting stuff, usually in some non-conventional way. You can hack anything from hardware, to DNA, to life itself." - Chris Drake.

To me, what I do and write about is interesting. If it wasn't interesting, I wouldn't do it. It is also a step away from how I was taught to do things so it fits the new definition of hacker quite well.

In Chris Drake's Tedx talk he says, " One thing in life that fascinates me is the idea of right and wrong. How many people does it all take to start doing something before it's no longer wrong. Well it's actually the reverse of that idea that I find more interesting. How long can you resist doing something before you become the fool for not doing it too."

Now I can't say that what I am doing, writing about, is right or wrong. All I know is that what I am doing, have done, is never enough. How can we push it a little further? For me the turf disease battle, art of greenkeeping, pesticide safety concerns and timely pesticide ban threat has ignited a passion and drive to try and look for change. Maybe I'm the fool for not doing what everyone else is doing? I hope that maybe I can inspire change for the good, whatever that is.

I would be a fool, however, to think or proclaim that I am the only one doing this sort of thing. Most Superintendents I know are turf hackers in their own right. They might not be into hacking turf disease but that's OK. Superintendents are a creative bunch and I owe all my success to the help of other turf industry professionals and my family!

This is why I feel that the name "Turf Hacker" fits me, and this blog perfectly. Happy 2014!

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 ...

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 ...

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...

Fusariummy

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