silica

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.

Golf course putting greens are covered with many types of grasses. I’ve written about my skepticism that adding Si will increase green speed in 3 posts on the blog (post 1, post 2, post 3), and I’ve done so in reference to Zoysia matrella greens which are known for the high silica content of the leaves.

A correspondent wrote to ask about the ever popular topic of Si and green speed: Pretty sure I already know the answer to this, but I had a conversation with our rep from […] fertilizer company about my frustration in not being able to increase our green speed […].

Beth Guertal wrote to me a couple weeks ago: “I liked your Si blog post of recent date. It made me go back and find some data I collected once upon a while.

Once upon a time,1 Paul Robertson asked if anyone was using a Pelzmeter to measure green speed. a long discussion followed, and the notifications on my Twitter account blew up.

We’ll get to the N below. But wow! I didn’t know silica was such a hot topic! After writing a few days ago (original post here) about silica and green speed, and how it doesn’t make sense to me that silica application could increase green speed, there was quite a response — by e-mail, at this wild discussion on Facebook, and on Twitter.

This is something that has never made sense to me. Actually, it seems ridiculous. Zoysia greens are not renowned for being especially fast. But zoysia has especially high silica content in the leaves.