Fusariummy

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 ...

Weather plays a big roll in how difficult a growing season might be. Things like temperature and rainfall are completely out of our control but also have a huge impact on what is possible to achieve for golf course maintenance operations. I've looked at many different ways to quantifying how weather can help or hinder my operations and have found that it's not as easy as it might first seem. There are a few techniques that I have come across that can paint a general picture of the weather may have impacted your growing season. I've been a big time user of the growth potential since 2012 when I first learned about how Micah Woods was using it to calculate potential fertilizer use. The growth potential is a temperature based growth model and can make a bit more sense out of temperature data and how it might impact turfgrass growth. This is because turf growth isn't directly proportional to temperature.  At low temperatures there is little growth but once you get past a ce...

Understanding soil moisture math makes managing poa in extreme heat a lot easier. Temps were 42C when I took this pic last summer You would think having a digital moisture meter would make irrigating a golf course easier. For the most part I think it does but I have also seen some subtle ways that turf managers have started using moisture meters that I think actually make our lives more difficult. Before we could accurately measure the soil moisture we were left to essentially guess. We had to use our limited powers of observation to make judgement calls on how much moisture we needed to apply. We would irrigate at night, and top up any visibly dry areas with a hose. We would then have to go out again in the afternoon to top of the additional areas that had dried out over the day. The only real way to tell if something needed more water was to look and see if the grass was wilting.  It was more difficult to determine if we were over-watering. There's a big difference in the amount ...

How much grass can your mower cut? The most basic way of calculating this is to take the width of the mower and multiply it by the speed. Let's say our mower is 2 meters wide and can mow at 10 km/h (keeping the math simple here). In one hour it will have cut 20,000 square meters or 2 ha. Wow, that's a lot of grass. Unfortunately it's not that simple. A lot of things go into how much grass you can cut and any observant turf manager will know that the actual productivity of a mower will be much lower than the maximum theoretical productivity as calculated above. This post will discuss what influences mower productivity and strategies we can use to maximize how much grass we can cut with a given mower or resource input. So why isn't our actual mower productivity the same as the maximum theoretical productivity? A lot of "mowing" isn't actually mowing. We use an hour meter to calculate how many hours the mower is operational and during this operational period ...

A few posts back I talked about how I found it useful to compare a 30 day running average growth ratio to a 30 day running average nitrogen genki. This would tell me  how my grass was growing and how much nitrogen I had applied compared to the standard level which I have determined to be about 2/g nitrogen per square meter per month at a 100% growth potential. After thinking and using that tool for a few months now, I wondered about the other nutrients. Last year I had issues with the grass not growing as expected and it turned out to be a phosphorus deficiency probably made worse by regular phosphite applications. The growth ratio model showed that the grass was growing too slow and in reality it probably was as we suffered from issues caused by slow growing turf such as Anthracnose! The more experience I get with the growth ratio model, the more valuable it becomes as a tool to help me keep the growth rate where I want it and plant health issues to the minimum. Most issues I hav...