stimpmeter

You’ve seen the trailer and heard the bleeps. Now, you can watch the full episode. This is “Flying Blind”, Episode 3 in Season 1 of my Grammar of Greenkeeping show.

Today I gave a seminar at the Thai GCSA meeting. Photo by Boy Yothin These are the slides in Thai. And these are the slides in English. We talked about a number of topics.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. That’s a generalization of Goodhart’s law. I’m an advocate of measuring some surface performance, plant, and soil parameters.

I was honored to speak at the 40th Congress of the Asociación Española de Greenkeepers in Seville. Organic matter In the 2016 article “Managing Organic Matter in Putting Greens,” Adam Moeller and Todd Lowe wrote this:

Here are data from 903 measurements I’ve made from 2011 to early 2021 excluding all tournament measurements. Table 1: Number of measurements and median green speed in feet, by species. Data from 867 stimpmeter readings by Micah Woods excluding tournament measurements.

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.

No, I’m not talking about the stimpmeter.1 And this tool will probably only be useful for a few people. In fact, the tool is probably not what you think it is.

While Eric Reasor was collecting the data on ball roll dispersion in Thailand – read yesterday’s post for more about that – I collected data on the the same greens.