Zoysia

There’s a short video about greenkeeper Mamoru Shoji and course maintenance at Kasumigaseki CC on YouTube. I especially like the view from the drone just after the 3 minute mark, showing the greens nestled among the carefully trimmed pine trees.

It’s been cloudy, and raining, and I wasn’t in a rush to cut the grass. I decided to skip mowing for exactly 4 weeks to demonstrate the difference in growth habit that I wish everyone paid attention to.

I get to see a lot of bermudagrass and zoysiagrass putting greens. In fact, most of my golf is played on one of those two surfaces. Sometimes people ask me about the ball roll on zoysia compared with roll on bermudagrass.

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.

The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) has a new series of videos about each of their facilities. I watched this one about the Manila American Cemetery with special interest. I think you’ll be impressed when you see this.

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.

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.

On February 28, I took Wana—a fine-bladed putting green type manilagrass—rhizomes and cut to a two node length. Then I planted these cut rhizomes, each with two tiny plants on them, in the center of sand-filled pots.

On February 28, 2020, I cut some Wana manilagrass rhizomes to a two node length and planted those two node rhizomes in four sand-filled pots. After eight days, I applied the first fertilizer treatment.

One of the things I’ve noticed when growing grasses in pots is the striking difference between aboveground stolons produced by bermudagrass, and underground rhizomes produced by zoysiagrass. These grasses were grown in pots and fertilized with N, P, and K.