carbon

This topic—carbon in turfgrass soils—was the subject of a Frankly Speaking podcast episode. One of the topics host Frank Rossi spoke about with guests Drs. Claire Phillips and Alec Kowalewski was the nitrogen mineralized from soil organic matter.

Turfgrass creates a lot of soil organic matter (SOM), also called humus, and the quantities of carbon (C) in that organic matter might surprise you. I made this chart to summarize the amount of C in the top 10 cm (4 inches) of a turfgrass rootzone.

One of the many valuable things I utilize from OM246 testing is what I call the organic matter accumulation rate. I’m actually referring to the net accumulation rate—how the total organic material in the rootzone would change if no topdressing had been applied.

Here’s another interesting article I came across recently. Dr. Carrow wrote an article in the October 1993 issue of GCM with the title Eight questions to ask: evaluating soil and turf conditioners.

A correspondent wrote with a question about soil biology for controlling organics, adding compost tea to feed beneficial bacteria, and etc. There are two articles that I recommend as an introduction to this topic, both by David Zuberer.

I came across an interesting example as I was reading the ‘Internal Structure’ chapter in Joshua Schimel’s Writing Science. The example is a quotation from Nitrogen and Nature by Vitousek et al.

There is an interesting article about carbon by Bryan G. and Tyler J. Hopkins in Crops & Soils magazine. Here’s a quick summary, put together with a series of quotes from the article.

“Do the MLSN guidelines use 17 essential nutrients? I’ve found a couple good articles,” my friend wrote, “but I couldn’t really find a number on the MLSN website.” “That’s an interesting question,” I replied, “and I may answer it on my blog.

Not everyone understands how the MLSN guidelines work. I saw a photo shared by Andrew McDaniel followed by a number of replies from STSAsia exhibiting confusion on the latter’s part about the use of the MLSN guidelines.