Fusariummy

When I was a lot younger, I aspired to one day work at a big budget golf course where I could use all the greatest tools and fancy fertilizers and chemicals. Being from an extremely low budget golf course, I often felt bad about my situation as I learned about all the "solutions" to my problems as I read the latest trade magazines but realized that we didn't have the resources to do any of these things. I thought that this brute force tactic was the only way. It wasn't until I learned about "minimalism" that I started to realize that there was a different way to approach my profession that would not only produce great playing conditions for our golfers, but also provide a great deal of personal satisfaction and acceptance from working at a low budget golf course. This was the time I started blogging and the time where I officially became a grass freak! Greenkeepers are weird. Just ask my wife, or John's! I want to preface anything I'm about to say wi...

Most of our greens have slowly transitioned towards bentgrass dominated swards in the past few years In a recent post I discussed how the nutrient content of the soils was different depending on the depth and outlined some ideas of how we could use this to our advantage. We can keep poa super happy with more consistency (it's known to be temperamental and this is probably why) or we can use it to suppress poa while promoting other turf species like bentgrass or fescue. There are major differences in nutrient content at depth and it is useful to understand this but it is also cumbersome to test at various depths or tissue test every week like some might do. Instead, we can use our Supercharged fertilizer and clipvol records to help us understand how much nutrient we are removing from the turfgrass system and adjust our fertilizer applications to either under-fertilize or apply a sufficient amount of each nutrient to favor one turfgrass species over the other. We can estimate how mu...

In my previous two posts I shared how changes to our mowing and rolling frequency resulted in better playing condition for half the price. This post will show how our growth rate contribute to that success and maybe will suggest one of the reasons I'm so obsessed with clipvol. It's the holy grail of turfgrass management. I initially measured clipvol to optimize our mowing frequency. I didn't want to cut greens if there wasn't any growth and I also didn't want to cut the greens and get too much grass. Over the years I have found that the ideal clipvol is about 20ml/m^2 per day. This is the figure I use in my Growth Ratio and is the target clipvol I aim for when I send out my mower. I can keep green speeds within our target easily with a clipvol within this range as can be seen in my previous post. What this means is that I want to get the exact same clipvol with every mowing. As I adjust the growth rates, the frequency of mowing will adjust to get this target clipvo...

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...