Where did all the clover go?

While out fertilizing the tees this morning I noticed something crazy. All the clover on the tees had disappeared. There has always been a good population of clover on the tees at Pender Harbour ever since I have worked here starting in 2001. Up until 2005 we would spot spray these areas with Killex but haven't applied any type of herbicide to them since then. Today I could only find one small patch less than 1 m2 on my tee boxes. Crazy!

So what the heck happened to the clover? It's not like the clover really bothered me. I was not trying to rid the tees of clover in any way. This was an indirect consequence of something that I did.

Two years ago I radically changed the way I fertilize and manage inputs on the golf course. I switched to the MLSN and stopped doing things "just because that's the way we have always done it." One of the main points of the MLSN is to only apply a nutrient when it is needed by the plant. With the MLSN I stopped applying calcium to "free up nutrients" in the soil as was always done with the BCSR. Consequently the pH on the tees dropped into the low 5's. From 2012 the pH dropped from 5.9 to 5.3 today. I had read a great article by Micah Woods about "Why it is Not Important to Maintain Soil pH Between 6.5 and 7.0." I decided to give it a try. I would closely monitor the situation and adjust the pH as needed if turf conditions started to deteriorate.

The only patch of clover on the tees.

In Micah's post he referenced the article called "Farming with Acidity" which talked about how pH was maintained as close to neutral as possible to allow the pH sensitive legumes (clover) to grow as they were a source of nitrogen to early farmers as they rotated crops. We no longer require legumes to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere as we have fertilizer! We kept maintaining a neutral pH because some studies showed that nutrient availability was greater at a neutral pH. We are now learning that the nutrient needs of turfgrass is much lower than previously thought. So I stopped liming "just because."

Tees have never been better.

After one year of no liming there was still quite a bit of clover on the tees. Even this spring I had noticed quite a bit of clover.

Beauty

Since 2012 I have really only applied nitrogen and wetting agents to the tees. This combined with the lack of liming has, in my opinion, lead to the disappearance of the clover. The pH is lower than even Micah recommended (5.5) and the tees have never been better in the 13 years I have been here. Just nitrogen, wetting agents, and some aeration every now and again. No "weeds." Super quick divot recovery. As close to perfect as I can expect.

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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