Posts

I’m bombarded at this time of year with reminders, notices, descriptions, and articles telling me about the importance of frost delays. Apparently, frost delays are essential for the health of the turf.

Tropical carpetgrass (Axonopus compressus) can tolerate low mowing, even down to putting green height. Here it is invading a seashore paspalum (Paspalum vaginatum) nursery green. Even though carpetgrass can grow at putting green heights, I don’t recommend it for greens.

How much irrigation is required at a particular location? That is an interesting question, and one gets widely different answers depending on the method used for calculation. The standard method involves taking the consumptive water use and subtracting the effective rainfall.

Play on frosted bentgrass greens in Japan is not uncommon. Winston Mirmow’s thesis on Fall potassium fertilization and winter traffic effects on a creeping bentgrass putting green has some surprising results.

One is an article, another is a podcast, and you won’t regret the time spent reading the first and listening to the second. First, the 4 November 2016 issue of the Green Section Record contains Managing Organic Matter in Putting Greens by Adam Moeller and Todd Lowe.

I showed how weather data can be used to calculate a daily soil water balance. One can adjust the rootzone characteristics, and the timing and amount of irrigation, so that the calculations are representative of what one wants to know.

One can calculate a water budget for a particular location to get an estimate of how much irrigation water is required. This article from the Green Section Record describes those calculations.

I don’t like turf diseases. If there is any fun in them, for me, it lies in only two things. First, is it a particularly well-named disease? Second, how awful are the symptoms?

Fred Varcoe wrote about putting greens on Japanese golf courses in the August 2016 issue of Euro Biz Japan. The article, [Know your greens (pdf, 3 MB)][1], includes some quotes from me about bentgrass, korai, and how balls roll on putting greens.

I made [a Shiny app with climatological normals data][1] from the Japan Meteorological Agency to show the combination of sunshine and temperature at 11 locations. [@naturalgolf_D asked][2] “What kind of situation is Japan?