Dumbing Down My Greensmower for the Winter

A solid front roller reduced gouging during the wet and soft conditions of the winter.

Two years ago when we got new mowers I was able to get 14 blade reels for my greens mower. Wow do they every produce a great quality of cut! At the same height of cut (HOC) I was able to get an extra foot of green speed. Struggling to get adequate green speeds became a thing of the past. We were also able to get walk behind quality from a triplex. SWEET!

The only problem I had was that during the winter I struggled to keep the density up, and the aggressiveness of the mowers would gouge when conditions were soft. I LOVED the summer quality of cut but needed to come up with something for the winter.

I had heard of guys using solid front rollers for bentgrass promotion with the theory that they produced less disruption. I'm not crazy pushing for bentgrass (at least not admitting to it publicly yet lol) but less disruption was exactly what I needed during the winter. I slapped an old set of solid front rollers on my greens heads. I also set the HOC WAY UP! WAY WAY UP. The highest that I have even bench set my greens cutting units. We went at 4.5mm all winter long and only just recently lowered them to 4mm. Even so, the greens after a mow and roll were just touching 10' on the stimpmeter! That was about 2-3' more than I needed so I wasn't concerned about the 4.5mm being "crazy high."

I even went a step further by slowing the reel speed. I wasn't too interested in removing too much grass in the winter as I wasn't growing that much grass either!

This past winter the greens have never been better, smoother, or faster. A lot of that can be contributed to tree removal and abnormally warm temperatures but I feel that these modifications made a big difference.

Going forward in the season I am going to leave the HOC where it is until conditions dictate having to go lower. I might even leave those solid front rollers on too! Either way, these reels are insane when you need them to be, but instead of having two sets of cutting units for each season, just make a few quick modifications and they will work great!

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?

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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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