Fusariummy

In my last post I discussed how too much aerification might be a bad thing and wondered if more is better or if there is an ideal amount of compaction that we can maintain to maximize soil health and help us reduce the inputs that we currently require to maintain our putting greens. Inputs like sand, fertilizer, tines, fungicide and water. I then shared how my greens have never performed better based on some anecdotal observations. Yesterday I decided that if I was going to try and aerifiy less or not at all that I would need to measure the things that aerification is supposed to manage so that I can track their change over time. Simply not doing something without knowing that it's working is simply a dumb thing to do. As usual, there were a ton of products that I needed to buy to figure out this kind of hokus pokus but then I remembered that I'm not doing super precise science here. I want to get a general idea of how my greens perform and relate that to my observations on ho

Have you ever noticed a disease outbreak immediately following aerification? I'm pretty sure most people have and this is why it is common practice to spray a fungicide before aerifying. Why does this happen? I always blamed the disease outbreak on the mechanical stress we put the grass under. I also noticed that the abrasive practices used to drag the sand into the aeration holes would spread the disease like crazy. Fusarium Spread from verticutting after aerification Niels Dokkuma from the Koninklijke Nederlandse Golf Federatie visited my course in February of 2017 to see what I was doing to reduce the pesticide use on my golf course because the Netherlands are facing an almost complete ban on pesticides in 2020 so they need to learn whatever they can to avoid disaster. He asked me a seemingly simple question. "Do you think aerification makes disease worse?" Of course I agreed with him and went into discussion about how we spread the disease around and the mechanical st

If you're a broke datahead like me you probably have always wanted to measure your putting green surface firmness but haven't been able to justify the $1000+ expense to buy one of the fancy testers available on the market. The problem I have had is that I just wasn't sure if it would be a metric that would make a difference in the way I managed my golf course. It was easy for me to justify the expense of a moisture meter almost 10 years ago because I could see how it would improve my operation. I'm still on the fence about the firmness tester so I asked twitter how I could make one for myself and as usual, was pleasantly surprised. This rather simple firmness tester was brought to my attention but it was still out of my price range at around $500. Dr. D made a great little video outlining these various devices and how they work. I decided to make an even cheaper version than what the PGA currently uses, again, because I am not sure if this is something that is valuable

I've talked about how to efficiently collect and analyze data on a golf course using google forms and google sheets on this blog. These free cloud based tools make is super easy to collect data in the field and have in instantly sorted and analyzed for use with decision making. The trouble with having multiple sheets for data collection is that you have to go to all these sheets to get the relevant data. My turfgrass maintenance HUD (heads up display) solves that problem by aggregating all my data into one place. Now I can see all the metrics that are important to my agronomic decision making process. I threw everything I have at this preliminary HUD design. The idea is that I will cut out the stuff that I don't use but only time will tell what is useful in my day to day grass growing decision making process. The foundation of this HUD is the =importrange() function in google sheets. This function allows you to pull data from another spreadsheet into the current spreadsheet. T

I've done a lot of talks recently all over the world about the MLSN guidelines and a common issue I come across is people getting hung up on the math. One of the biggest advantages of MLSN is giving the power to determine how much fertilizer to apply back to the superintendent, but if you can't figure out the math you are no better off than when you started. If it wasn't already obvious, I love math. I see the world as numbers and use them to help me better understand what I see. This is one of the reasons the MLSN instantly made sense to me back in 2012. The numbers just didn't add up for me with fertilizer recommendations coming from things like BCSR or SLAN. It was almost like these recommendations were being pulled out of thin air.... The fact that the math behind the MLSN is freely available and quite simple to do should say a lot about the benefits of this system. Before I start I would suggest checking out PACE Turf's Climate Appraisal form and Micah's M