Fusariummy

I was made aware of Doug Soldat's annual tweet showing the difference of disease on bentgrass with and without potassium fertilizer on one of Micah Wood's latest blog posts . The difference is drastic and the picture still impresses years later. Micah and Doug also just did an hour long video on the subject. For that past few years I have struggled controlling the disease at my new course. Nothing we did would control the fusarium. I sent off samples to labs and tried every chemical control available. Nothing worked as good as I remembered it working at Pender. This year (knock on wood. I'm not superstitious just a little stitious) the disease has been virtually non-existent despite the various disease models being maxed out for m.nivale. Needless to say it has been very Fusariummy this winter ( you're supposed to drink every time I type it) but we have been able to manage the disease to very manageable levels. Levels that are less than ball marks and insect damage co...

Most people still confuse the actual meaning of the MLSN guidelines with things like low nitrogen and super low fertilizer usage. While anyone who reads this blog knows this not to be the case I am still surprised to hear other people's interpretations of what they are? Can a computer decipher the MLSN better than that average Greenkeeper?  HAHAHAHA It got the name wrong but it was close.  It understood that the MLSN is for nutrient levels in soils for turfgrass. Awesome. It got the names of the people who developed the guidelines completely wrong. Dr. Nick Christians is a real person but I'm not sure if John Cushman is. For the Record they were developed by Dr Wendy Gelernter, Dr. Larry Stowell and Dr Micah Woods.  It got it wrong saying that the MLSN includes recommendations for nitrogen (like everyone else) and micronutrients. The last sentence could be considered true. I asked the AI who uses the MLSN guidelines? Not too bad. I'm not surprised that the AI got this wro...

The MLSN guidelines are by definition the MINIMUM levels of Sustainable Nutrition. This means that the soil nutrient levels should be above the guideline to have healthy turfgrass. As the MLSN is much lower than conventional guidelines, you will more than likely have higher amounts of nutrient in the soil if you are using different nutrient guidelines. Therefore, if you are using a different guidelines AND have more than the MLSN guidelines in your soil you are also within the recommendations of the MLSN and technically a user of the MLSN.  If your soil tests are higher than these figures you are using the MLSN There is no maximum or ideal amount for the MLSN, just the level where you should not go below. What is different with the MLSN to most other guidelines is the philosophy surrounding the guidelines. This includes maximizing the nutrients already contained in your soils. You do not have to do this to be a user of the MLSN. You just need to have soil test levels above the guid...

Unless you have been living under a rock you have probably heard about Chat GPT, a chat bot created by the company OpenAI that is leaps and bounds better than anything created so far. I decided to see how good ChatGPT was at greenkeeping. Wow. Not too bad. As a generalized summary of green speed it isn't too far off especially with the caveat at the end suggesting the guidance of a golf course superintendent. Even the Machine understands the importance of a qualified superintendent. I wish more golfers did the same! haha. I then asked it about mowing. Again, not too bad especially with the recommendation of professional turfgrass managers supervision. What about rolling? Generally, this is still probably the recommended advice although my experience of rolling over the past 12 years would suggest that we can safely roll up to twice daily without serious concern as long as you do it under the guidance of a golf course superintendent which the AI continues to remind me.  Awesome.

Having good fertilizer records is important because it's important to know what you have done so that you can plan for the future. I've seen so many instances of fertilizer records that are descriptions of what you have done, but are formatted in a way that provides little information that is easily digested or that can be used to guide future decisions. At the most basic level a fertilizer application record should contain the date, area applied, type of product, amount of product and your spreader setting and looks like this: One of my first digital fertilizer records from 2008 While this is a good record of what you did at the most basic level, it is almost next to useless to actually help you understand how much of each nutrient was applied. Are you applying fertilizer for the name on the bag or are you applying fertilizer to alter the nutrient content of your soils? Making these calculations easier was one of the main reasons I initially switched from paper records to a sp...

For the past 3 years the organic material in the top 2 cm of our greens has seen a steady increase. I discussed in a recent post about the value of time series comparisons for fertilizer recommendations and I think the same is true for organic matter management. Would you say we are doing a good job managing our surface organic material levels? I don't know about you, but for me, we are not doing enough and the data is clear. Regardless of the conditions of the greens today (they are pretty damn good BTW) the upward trend will likely change the way they perform in the future so I am more comfortable with a trend line that is flat or unchanged year to year. I've always found aerification a bit confusing and never felt like I had the tools to make a good decision. I was essentially guessing which didn't make me feel good when the guess resulted in massive disruption to our playing surfaces. Was it justified? How could I be sure? I started measuring the Total Organic Material ...

Last week on January 13th I noticed that the areas that were still brown from last Summer's drought, had a tinge of green to them. These unirrigated areas were not able to recover from the prolonged drought because once the rains returned, it was too cold for growth. Poa annua germination in unirrigated areas mid winter It was actually the warmest day since October 30, 2022.  It was the only "good day" that I have had in any of the Winter months in the past 4 years and the second best day since June 15, 2022. That's 2 good days in 212 days! It's one thing to have these kinds of models at your disposal and it's another thing to see how accurate they are when compared to observations made in the field. I noticed we were finally starting to see some recovery due to the "good" weather and the model shows that we actually had a good day for growth. Cool.

I am totally guilty of making the MLSN more complicated than it needs to be. When the MLSN was first developed, it showed me a whole new world in the ways that I could fertilize grass. Naturally, I wanted to test the limits and see what else I could learn. In the process I did some complicated math, calculations and measurements to have fun with this new found knowledge. The MLSN are not targets, they are soil levels you should not go below and do not include nitrogen recommendations. Not everyone needs or should do that, however. The MLSN guidelines are actually extremely easy to use and you don't have to do much math if any to get the full benefit of the guidelines. You can make it as easy or difficult as you want. Micah Woods has talked about it before on his blog but I will share it again with my own take. If you want to make turfgrass fertilizing as simple as possible. Don't test your soils and simply just apply fertilizer in the ratio that the nutrients are found in the...

When I first learned about the growth potential formula it blew my mind. Until that point I was always taught that grass grew a certain way with peaks of growth in the Spring and the Fall like the image below. https://extension.umn.edu/planting-and-growing-guides/lawn-care-calendar In some climates, cool season turf grows exactly like the image above but this wasn't what I was seeing on the West Coast of Canada. The growth potential formula suggested otherwise as it used data from my specific location. Instead of the two peaks of growth it showed a single peak of growth for my location.  Growth potential calculated for my specific location After a few years of collecting clippings the wrong way, Micah Woods finally convinced me to measure the clippings with a pail and covert this to ml/m^2. The results fit the growth potential model almost perfectly. Here is the data from my previous course. And here is the data from my current course. As you can see, the clipping yield data fits t...