Visualizing how the growth potential model changed the way I fertilize my golf course

In my last post I outlined how the amounts of fertilizer applied to my golf course has changed over the years due to adopting the MLSN guidelines. In this post I will show some cool animated charts that show how the way I fertilize has changed as I adopted the growth potential model. Special thanks for Micah Woods for making these cool animated charts with my data. Refresh the page if the animation doesn't repeat.

This first chart shows the monthly nitrogen applications to my greens side by side going back until 2008. As you can see, as time goes on the rates get lower but they also get more consistent with less big spikes. Looking back 8 years I can't help but wonder what I was thinking! It is really too bad that I don't have growth rate data going back more than a few years.

You can see that in early 2012 I was on a similar track to what I would normally be on. That was until I came across this article about using growth potential to determine nitrogen rates based on temperature by Micah Woods from 2012. I started using growth potential in late 2012 but didn't get into a good groove until 2014. This was because in 2012 I was just starting out and in 2013 I had to add more fertilizer to help my greens recover from winter damage. Since then I have lost very little grass and fertilizing has been business as usual with no major variances from the growth potential model.

The next animation shows the same thing as the last one except the monthly amounts are transposed on top of each other so that you can more easily compare how the rates per month changed.

The chart below shows the cumulative amount of nitrogen applied to my greens over the years. As you can see, my total annual nitrogen rates are where I used to be at in May! This has had a big impact on thatch as well as the amount that we need to mow our greens in the spring. It has also helped us get a better quality of cut during the poa seed head flush each spring.

Thanks again to Micah for making these charts with my data. I find it interesting to look back at what I have done and to compare it like this.

Next up is to try and figure out what changes if any I plant to make for my fertilizer practices in 2017!

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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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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