Botanical walks and circle cuts

I made two new videos that you may like to watch.

This one shows a circle mowing technique on bentgrass greens that accomplishes a ton of things all at once.

These include:

• the blades are cutting for the entire time because there are no turns off the green
• this causes a double cut, or more, in different directions, which may be useful in cutting extra leaves and reducing grain
• because there are no turns off the green, there is no traffic or turns on collars and green surrounds—these surfaces may benefit when given a respite from traffic

I also made a video showing all the grasses I found on a walk at Ishigaki Island.

I walked along the same section of beach that I explored in 2012. I found, and discussed, a lot of warm-season grass species. I like to study how grasses perform in the wild, and in what type of environment they are found. As I explained in the video, there’s plenty to be learned about grass selection and maintenance simply by observing how these grasses perform in nature.

In addition to those videos, I also recorded an ATC Doublecut podcast with Dr. John Rowland from the USGA Green Section. We talked about soil testing, seasonal changes in test results, organic matter testing, some sampling and lab protocol issues, and a range of things that are useful to understand about soil tests.

That ATC Doublecut episode is available for listening as a podcast or you can watch the episode on YouTube.