"Turf always seems to need something done to it"
“There is much resentment that much of our turf always seems to need something done to it, especially when people want to be enjoying the turf.”
There’s nothing new about trying to minimize surface disruption while producing enjoyable surfaces. I was reminded of this while rereading the report of the Turf Committee from the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Agronomy:
There is much resentment that much of our turf always seems to need something done to it, especially when people want to be enjoying the turf. Research programs everywhere will do well to devote a portion of their areas to studies which will determine MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS1 in everything.
That’s from the report of the committee in 1952.
When that report was written, most of you reading this weren’t born yet. A lot of your parents weren’t born yet.
Today we still do research to determine how to maximize the turf conditions without always having to disrupt it.
I want to recommend two things you can do to shift turf management in the direction of more enjoyment, less disruption, and less resentment.
One, look at your nitrogen rate, and make sure you aren’t inadvertently growing more grass than you need to. Second, have a read of this article which provides a simple framework of a few things you can easily keep track of over time. The process of doing that, along with an annual review to compare to past years, should lead to identification and clarification of the maintenance requirements at your location.
The capitalization is from the original 1952 report. ↩︎