Thailand

I’ve noticed that traffic—just enough traffic—can transform some grasses into an amazing type of surface. I’ve seen this with Cynodon in China, with Festuca in Iceland, and in other places as well, but those are a couple that come to mind.

I’ve been making estimates of N mineralization from soil organic matter for the past few years using the method described by Gilmour and Mauromoustakos in Nitrogen mineralization from soil organic matter: a sequential model.

Last year I wrote about manilagrass (Zoysia matrella) sod on highway medians in Thailand. I showed photos of a recently planted median, and explained why zoysia doesn’t persist in this environment when maintained without supplemental irrigation and regular mowing.

I see a lot of grass in driveways, parks, lawns, and fields when I run around southern Thailand. And because I can’t run very fast, and I happen to be curious about grasses, I get a pretty good look at what is growing.

This is usually where I show a map with all my flights, mention that they took me some hundred thousands of kilometers, and then share some of my favorite turf photos from all the places I went.

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.

I’ve been using the NASA POWER agroclimatology data for a few projects. I get the data using the convenient nasapower R package by Adam Sparks. There is also a web-based map data access viewer.

I’ve seen a lot of highways in Thailand. Highway medians are sodded with manilagrass (Zoysia matrella) as a matter of course (more about the cost of that below). I’ve seen some impressive vistas of this work in past years, but for safety reasons haven’t been able to get any photos.

Have you ever seen patches like this on Zoysia turf? Maybe the early stages of an intense large patch outbreak, or elephant’s footprint (Rhizoctonia cerealis) that got out of control? Way out of control?

I spent a morning with Brad Revill at Nikanti GC last month. I wanted to see the course, get some measurements, see the clipping volume measurement, and talk about turf management with Brad.