topdress

Some years ago I shared some articles that I often referred to or recommended, and I called that Five articles every greenkeeper should read. As I look at this list of articles now, I’m reminded of the familiar maxim about understanding the rules before breaking them.

I’ve been sitting on this idea for a long time, and I decided today would be a great day to write about it. You can decide if I’m serious. When we first study turfgrass management, we tend to learn a proactive approach.

A recent conversation about putting surfaces in Japan led to discussion of topdressing amounts and frequency. The Greenkeeper 2018 has course maintenance summaries for 17 courses in Japan. I mapped the locations of those courses by zip code.

PACE Turf have prepared this spreadsheet that takes inputs of average temperatures and a maximum monthly topdressing rate, and gives outputs of estimated monthly and annual topdressing sand amounts. It is a metric version of this:

There’s a new spreadsheet available from PACE Turf that uses the temperature-based growth potential to estimate the quantity of sand required as topdressing. They wrote: “To get a rough idea of how much sand to apply over the course of the year, we have developed a simple spreadsheet that uses growth potential (GP) as a guide, and a maximum sand application of 150 lbs dry sand/1000 ft2 per month at maximum turf growth.

Frank Rossi and Dan Dinelli had an interesting conversation on Turfnet Radio. I learned a few things, and I even agree with some of what they discussed. But not all of it.

Here’s a mystery about green patterns in straight lines on greens in Iceland. This is Iceland in early May. There was still snow on the mountains around Reykjavik. The greens in question are primarily fine fescue.

This soil profile, showing how the soil has been modified after about 70 years of management as a golf course putting green, is absolutely fascinating. This photo is from a course in Sydney, Australia.