bentgrass

T-Jay Creamer is the golf course superintendent at Olympic View GC in Victoria, British Columbia. The greens there are a mix of bentgrass and Poa annua, and as of May 2024 it’s considerably more Poa than bent.

When a creeping bentgrass green is sixteen years old, do you expect to find some Poa annua in it? I do. When I see greens that age without noticing any Poa plants, I pay attention.

プレゼンテーション資料は上記の PDF リンクから入手してください。 OM246 の詳細については、このプレゼンテーションを参照してください。 WinterTurf 日本語のATCアップデートのメーリングリストに参加を申し込む. 申し込む. Download the slides from this presentation at the PDF link above. See more about OM246 testing, including sampling instructions and a sample report, at the OM246 project page.

Frank Rossi and Chris Tritabaugh had a short conversation about the fascinating Park Grass experiment, and about a lot more than that—fertilizer, bentgrass, dogma, salaries, budgets, detail work, GPS sprayers, and so on.

Doug Soldat has been posting these spectacular photos every year. See the “related posts” section at the bottom for more of these from past years. When he shared this one, he wrote “stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

This is a difficult problem—pitch mark scars—and the only long term solution I know of is firmer surfaces. I was reminded of that this week when I saw balls bouncing on the greens at a tournament in Japan (see videos below).

I was passing through Corvallis and stopped to meet Tom Cook, who maintains his primarily bentgrass lawn with the greatest of care. Or is it neglect? He has not applied fertilizer to the lawn in 15 years, irrigates during the summer dry period only enough to keep the grass green, mows weekly, hand pulls the most egregious weeds, interseeds with white clover, and even keeps an unirrigated strip of turf in which one can find rat’s-tail fescue (Vulpia myuros).

There’s a short video about greenkeeper Mamoru Shoji and course maintenance at Kasumigaseki CC on YouTube. I especially like the view from the drone just after the 3 minute mark, showing the greens nestled among the carefully trimmed pine trees.

When I think about disturbance, I think primarily of verticutting and hollow-tine coring and sand topdressing and then brushing that sand in. Such an approach—one with disturbance—requires a faster growth rate too, and higher nutrient inputs, in order to recover from the disturbance.

Bentgrass grows more—or at least it produces more clippings for a while—when temperatures are higher than optimum for net photosynthesis. This means that you’ll typically see more clippings when the temperature is above the optimum for cool-season grass, even though the growth potential (GP) goes down at those high temperatures.