Tracking the bentgrass spread or lack thereof

A mixed stand. It's hard to tell which way the population is shifting, if at all.

I want to know if the bentgrass on my greens was in fact spreading or just there from the seed and on a gradual decline. I looked into tracking turfgrass cover and all the methods involved a lot of time and effort. What I came up with was to simply cut cups in poa one day and in bentgrass the other day. That way I would be placing poa plugs in bentgrass and bentgrass plugs in poa. This would allow me to see if there was in fact a population shift on my putting greens. This looks weird as there are now a bunch of perfect circle patches on my greens but over time they should blend out and be less noticeable.

Poa Plugs in Bentgrass

Bentgrass Plug in Poa

Poa plug in Poa/bent

Poa in Bentgrass

You will notice that the bentgrass is quite "grainy." I am intentionally not fighting the grain as I feel that the longer leaf blade of the bentgrass might give it a competitive edge. The grass blades physically cover the poa plants. Maybe it also gets more fertilizer as the leaf is bigger and I apply fertilizer exclusively in liquid applications.

The grain doesn't seem to be impacting ball roll in a significant way. Certainly not in a way that the golfers here can notice. They are also rolling surprisingly fast for the height of cut (~9.5' @ 0.160" or 4mm).

For more information on what I am trying regarding bentgrass, Check out this post here: Grow What Grows

Who knows?

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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