Fusariummy

There are lots of people who talk about soil balance and the biology in the soil. This is something that is really hard to quantify but as I start to measure yield and compare the growth rates to disease rates, it is starting to make sense to me. Something that has always bothered me is people selling products that claim to achieve that balance. As we know so little about soil biology, how can any one product really make that big of a difference? To my simple brain, it just doesn't make sense. One of my main struggles over the years has been trying to understand turfgrass disease and how we can prevent it and the need for corrective traditional pesticides. I have made great progress in trying to reduce their use on my course . I have tried to cut through the bullshit out there and focus on what really matters. There is so much dogma surrounding turfgrass disease and it is easy to get confused about what really makes a difference in making reductions in pesticide use. One of the mos...

It has now been just over 2 weeks since I started measuring clipping yields on individual greens. Firstly, it's worth noting that we have not recorded any increase in time that it takes to cut the greens in the morning. Yes, it's only been 6 mows compared to thousands in our database but it's insignificant. Not having time simply isn't an excuse to not do this. As my damaged greens recover they have had higher growth rates due to the increased fertilizer that was applied to try and speed the recovery. My undamaged greens got their regular fertilizer rates based on the growth potential and are growing much slower. In an earlier post I wondered how I would transition the high growth to low growth. What I have done is simply not apply nitrogen to the greens that are growing too fast. This has been the result. As you can see the damaged greens are still growing quite a bit faster than the undamaged but now that the undamaged greens are the only ones receiving supplemental ...

I never thought having dead greens could be so interesting. Extreme circumstances like having to grow in new greens has given me completely different growth rates across my greens. Obviously this isn't great for consistency but it is great for learning stuff and maybe improving for the future. Right now I have highly variable growth rates on my various greens and this can be used to my advantage to see how this different growth rate impacts playability. This week I decided to compare clipping yield to green speed. It's a limited data set and I will continue to collect it into the future to get better data but the first set of results is pretty interesting but not entirely surprising. Please remember that there are a million variables involved here. Grass type, cultural practices, height of cut, roll or no roll all can impact the ball roll. I think this will have to be measured on each course and for each cultural practice to figure out what is best for your course. Also note th...