Fertilizer Use 2014

It has been a while since my last post. In my defense I have been a bit busy. In September my wife and I welcomed our second son, Avery, into the world. I was also busy working towards my search and rescue Rope Team Leader certification. This involved years of training and a test that lasted 20 hours!

It's that time of the year where things are slow and I begin to look back at my records, reflect, and make changes to better my operation for the next season.

The first thing I have looked at is my fertilizer records. I have made great strides to reduce the amount of fertilizer applied, the cost of the fertilizer and the time taken to apply this fertilizer. Last year I started using the MLSN guidelines and was amazed with the huge impact this made. This year the impact was less dramatic but I still saw reductions in almost all categories.

For those that don't know. We have 0.4ha of poa greens, 0.3 ha of bent/rye tees and 4.5ha of rye/bluegrass fw.

Here is the raw data:

Total Product (Kg)
Area	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
Greens	1043	1066	1160	537	842	424
Tees	770	590	478	253	379	213
Fairways	4975	4663	3991	2295	1161	1664
Total Product	6788	6319	5629	3085	2382	2301

Total Cost	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
Greens	$4,132.00	$3,785.00	$1,480.00	$404.00	$707.00	$387.00
Tees	$1,363.00	$1,104.00	$980.00	$463.00	$582.00	$231.00
Fairways	$6,894.00	$5,922.00	$6,900.00	$3,566.00	$1,250.00	$1,658.00
Total Costs	$12,389.00	$10,811.00	$9,360.00	$4,433.00	$2,539.00	$2,276.00

Total Time	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
Greens	40	35	52.5	135	34	34
Tees	18	22.5	17.5	20	22.5	13.5
Fairways	24	18	21	18	25	37.5
Total Time	82	75.5	91	173	81.5	85

The total mass of fertilizer applied this year remained almost exactly the same. I applied almost half the product on the greens but saw a slight increase in fairway fertilizer as I tried to battle dollar spot this summer. The tees also saw a reduction of almost half year over year.

Costs were also down slightly with trends similar to the amounts of fertilizer applied to each respective area of the course.

Labor was up just slightly as I made a few extra fertilizer applications on the fairways this summer.

Total nutrient amounts applied are as follows:

	G/m2
Area	N	P	K	S	Ca	Mg	Fe
Greens	19.26	1.89	4.61	14.62	6.18	0.00	1.56
Tees	21.25	0.00	0.00	5.16	5.00	2.50	1.67
Fairways	11.00	0.00	0.00	5.24	0.00	1.50	2.00

Now none of this matters without results.

I don't plan on making too many additional changes for next year. I plan to do more soil tests this coming spring and will adjust to stay just above the MLSN guidelines.

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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