research

I’d read the soil sampling instructions from Penn State and Rutgers, suggesting a minimum of 12 subsamples be combined as a composite sample for each area. When I give instructions for sampling, I suggest a minimum of 5 subsamples be collected per green (or per area).

I’ve recommended taking at least 5 subsamples per green, for as long as I can remember. That’s less than the 12 to 15 recommended by Rutgers, less than the 12 or more in the Penn State instructions, and way less than the 20 subsamples per composite recommended by Donohue.

There’s an article by Donohue, Evaluation of soil nutrient variability for development of turfgrass soil test sampling methods, that describes results from sampling a 2,000 m2 (21,520 ft2) lawn at the Virginia Tech Turfgrass Center Laboratory.

The instructions from Rutgers are to take from 12 to 15 samples from a single putting green. I like to check Penn State recommendations too—their websites are a wealth of reference materials.

After I read the article by Lawrence et al. on Guiding soil sampling strategies using classical and spatial statistics: A review, I made some calculations, sent a few email inquiries, looked up some standard recommendations for turfgrass testing, reread another article on this topic, sent out a Twitter poll, and started drafting a blog post.

I showed the appearance of two greens-type grasses—Tifeagle and a greens-type manilagrass—in this post. That post had photos of the grasses, 28 days after planting, when fertilized with N only, with N + P + K, and with N + P + K + dolomite.

I wondered what would happen if I added P and K and dolomite, or withheld those elements, from some turf I planted recently at ATC南店. Tifeagle 28 days after planting in coconut coir as 3 cm diameter plugs.

I really enjoyed listening to Frank Rossi and Jim Brosnan discuss weed control, Poa annua, herbicide resistance, and glyphosate in their recent discussion on TurfNet’s Frankly Speaking. I’d recommend listening to this to learn more about some important turfgrass management challenges and the research being done right now to find solutions.

On April 22 I planted some ‘Sena’ manilagrass with the help of staff from the GolfEast company. We were careful to plant at an exact rate, and we documented the grow-in through digital image analysis.

Jason Haines has written recently about The future of robot mowers today and I recommend having a read of that post for more insight, and some videos of these types of machines.