fertilizer

This is one I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and have discussed with many turf managers, but I don’t think I’ve explained it on the blog yet. So here goes.

This is a movie about making fertilizer recommendations from soil tests using MLSN. I hope you enjoy watching this, and that this video provides a few new bits of information about what MLSN is and how it works.

This inquiry came by email under the heading of “MLSN for leaf tissue.” Dear Micah, hope you are fine, it has been a while since we talked last. I must say that I have seen quite a lot of analyses of turf soil with good characteristics and fertilizer levels close to your MLSN.

Grant Saunders asked a series of questions about the quantity of nutrients required in the soil, using calcium as an example. One can see that full discussion here. When he asked this question, I thought the clearest way to answer it would be with a blog post.

In the autumn of 2017, Stewart Brown wrote to me. “Dear Sir, I write on behalf of the European Turfgrass Society for which I am the current President.” He was inviting me to give a keynote presentation at the 2018 conference in Manchester.

When I moved my books to a different room, I was reminded that one of them contains this strongly-worded sentence. These “disasters,” “expensive corrective measures,” and “deterioration of good golfing conditions” are completely avoidable.

A full year of putting green clipping volume measurements looks like this. Well, it’s like that with a number of caveats. This is what it looked like: at this location 21° N latitude with seashore paspalum turf managed the way it was with the weather of the past year growing in the soil conditions of this site irrigated with this water etc.

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.

I was searching the Turfgrass Information File for ’turfgrass quality rating’ and a couple interesting silicon/silica/silicate projects appeared in the results. The first one, Fortification of Potassium Silicate With Compost Tea and Seaweed Extract for the Management of Dollar Spot of Turfgrass by Manoharan, I’ll summarize with this quote: “this study did not effectively control the dollar spot disease severity.