fertilizer

Ben Kebby has started a Facebook group, Tuesday Evening Research Papers, or T.E.R.P.S. He shared this week an article I wrote in 2012 about understanding turfgrass nutrient requirements. I tried to write a 1 page update or overview to elaborate on that, but it spilled over to 2 pages.

There’s an interesting article by Espevig et al. on Effects of rolling and N-fertilization on dollar spot and Microdochium patch on golf greens in Scandinavia. rolling a red fescue green two times a week reduced dollar spot by 61% compared to no rolling rolling four times a week reduced dollar spot by 95% increasing annual N on a creeping bentgrass + Poa annua green from 15 to 24 g/m2 reduced dollar spot by 24% but the following spring saw twice as much Microdochium patch on the plots which received the higher N rate There are a number of surface performance benefits that come from rolling, and disease suppression is one of them.

A few years ago Blake Meentemeyer and Brian Whitlark wrote about fertilizer in the Green Section Record. I’ve recommended this article before, and in that post I highlighted a case study from the article—a “facility in the Las Vegas area” reduced putting green fertilizer cost by a staggering 82%.

I had a great email exchange last December. It gets at what is really required, in a couple key areas, to produce high quality surfaces. And that might be less than you think.

A couple weeks ago I was preparing for a seminar in which I discussed Charles Vancouver Piper and the early days of turfgrass science in the United States. I recalled—or quite possibly I misremembered, as I haven’t been able to find it yet—having read some years ago something by Piper about nostrums.

The normal range of calcium (Ca) in irrigation water is 20 to 60 ppm. That comes right from Penn State’s Irrigation water quality guidelines for turfgrass sites. Were you surprised by the previous post that worked out daily Ca use by the grass, and Ca added in irrigation water, to find that irrigation water was supplying 26 times more Ca than the grass was using?

A friend gave me a beautiful card yesterday and wrote “perhaps you can use this Taraxacum officinale [dandelion] in some capacity.” I certainly can. Contining with the topic of my last post—cases in which low nutrient levels are desirable—the mention of dandelions reminds me of another case in which I’d adjust fertilizer recommendations.

The MLSN guideline for phosphorus (P) is 21 ppm. I usually recommend enough P fertilizer to keep soil P, as measured by the Mehlich 3 extractant, from dropping below 21 ppm.

Remember the Viridescent blog, with its 841 posts made from 1 January 2009 until I switched to this new site in 2017? I’ve summarized the top posts on that site by year, here, and today I checked the most viewed posts of all time.

Last week I led a seminar about MLSN on Monday. Then I did it again on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. In these approximately three hour seminars each day, I went into a lot of detail about MLSN.