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I was in northern Idaho this week to participate in the Northwest GCSA Expo. I gave two presentations. In the first, Turf Around the World, I explained how the things I’ve learned as I have traveled around the world led to the way I’m thinking about turfgrass management right now.

It is really interesting, for me at least, to see how much grass grows. One way to put a number to how much grass grows is to measure the clipping volume of the grass mown from an area.

There are lots of articles and blog posts at this time of year about fall fertilization and dormant fertilizer applications and keeping turf supplied with plenty of potassium too. I don’t think there is anything magic about fertilizer applications at this time of year.

Everyone using growing degree days (GDD) in turf management should be sure they are calculating them and working with them in just the right way. This new guide on the nuance of growing degree day calculations from Bill Kreuser and UNL explains the calculation and makes sure you have all the information you need:

Who would have thought that adding potassium would increase disease? I enjoyed talking with Doug Soldat about this research when he presented “Potassium fertilization affects microdochium patch severity on creeping bentgrass” by Bier et al.

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:

Planting rates for grass stolons are usually described as bushels per acre in the USA, I think. In Thailand, the rates are often described as mass of stolons, i.e. kg/m2.

I saw a list of proposed topics for an upcoming turfgrass conference, and under the heading of soil fertility was included base saturation. I immediately thought of this paragraph from Murray McBride’s Environmental Chemistry of Soils:

One can look at the growth of the grass, as approximated by the clipping volume, in a couple of ways. There’s the quantity of clippings – here’s how much the grass is growing.

I’ve thought about and described turfgrass management in three different ways. I use all of these, but they are all slightly different, and each is at a different level of abstraction.