Aeration Recovery and Nitrogen

Aeration season is coming up and I just wanted to mention a few thoughts I have on the subject.

I can't speak for everyone but it seems that it is common practice to apply a rather heavy nitrogen app just prior to aeration to speed the recovery. This makes sense as we are often forced to aerate when the temperatures and growth potential are not ideal for recovery but ideal to minimize the disruption to golfers. The pressure the golfers put on us to have perfect playing conditions immediately after aeration force us to do whatever it takes to get the greens back into shape.

One of the things that I have talked a lot about on this blog is growth potential and nitrogen fertility and how growth rates are influenced more by temperature than by how much nitrogen we apply. Of course the amount of nitrogen applied has some impact on growth but if the temperatures aren't there it will do little.

4 days post aeration, no additional nitrogen
applications made. 12mm holloww tine.

For the past 3 years I have stopped applying excess nitrogen fertilizer prior to aeration simply because it really made no real difference to recovery times. It seemed counter intuitive to apply excess nitrogen leading to excess growth and thatch buildup when the whole point of core aeration was to remove thatch.

9 days post aeration, greens putt and almost look,
like normal. No additional N

In the above pictures the week prior 0.07kg N/100m2 was applied. A week after aeration 0.05kg N was applied and the next week 0.04kg N. This was the constant growth potential feed.

Here's a thought, this year during your spring core aeration put down some check plots when you apply your nitrogen boost. See what the difference to recover really is when no excess nitrogen is applied. You might be surprised to see no difference, less disease and save a few bucks while you're at it.

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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