Thailand

This is an interesting story about a common grass that rarely appears in a lawn as just a single species – as a monostand. But at an especially high profile location in Bangkok, the lawns are almost pure javagrass (Polytrias indica).

I was wondering when it usually rains in Bangkok. The climatological normals for Bangkok show that there is a six month dry season from November to April, in which the average precipitation in each month is less than 100 mm (4 inches).

As I say at the end of every year, it has been another extraordinary year for studying grass around the world. See these links for some of my favorite photos (and flight maps) from 2015 and 2016.

Yesterday I wrote that bermudagrass fairways in Thailand wouldn’t be as good as they are in the Algarve because of climate differences. The cumulative rain so far this year makes a nice illustration of this.

There are a variety of grasses used for lawns and sports turf in central Thailand. I gave a presentation last week at the American Society for Horticultural Science annual meeting about the growth of three of those grasses:

I’ll be speaking at the Thailand Golf Travel Mart in Khao Yai next week as part of the Thailand Golf Paradise seminar about course design, renovation, maintenance, and operations. These are the slides for my presentation about the best playing conditions with the fewest inputs.

Many of you will have seen the Kantarat Golf Course when flying into Bangkok. Maybe you’ve played it. It sits between the two runways at Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok.

I took 82 flights in 2016, for a total of 221,494 km (137,000 miles), and I’ve just mapped them. That’s more than 5 times the circumference of the earth. Routes flown once are more blue, and the routes flown more often are more red.

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.

When Eric Reasor flew from Tennessee to Thailand, he brought along measuring tools to assess how golf balls roll across putting greens. He visited 22 golf courses in 5 days.