Bermuda

One of the items in my blog posts TODO file has the heading Zoysia and water use Wherley et al. “Didn’t I already write about that one?” I thought to myself as I was checking the list.

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’m giving two presentations at the Japan Turf Show in Tokyo this week. In the first one, I explain why light, by which I mean photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), is more important for ultradwarf bermudagrass than it is for creeping bentgrass.

I discussed photosynthetically active radiation during a seminar this week in Tokyo. This slide showed the distribution of the daily light integral (DLI) in Tokyo during 2014 on days with an average temperature greater than or equal to 20°C.

Following up on the low temperature analyses (first one, second one) as they are related to creeping bentgrass during hot summer weather, I have taken a look at a single location over time.

The Japan Turf Show is one of my favorite events of the year. In fact, I like the show so much that I wrote a remote report for the 2012 show that I could not attend.

Twelve years ago this week, I was working with the maintenance crew at Habu CC just east of Tokyo to overseed the bermudagrass fairways with perennial ryegrass. First we verticut, swept, mowed, swept, brushed, mowed, and swept the fairways to prepare them for seeding.

Twelve years ago, I moved from Shanghai Links Golf and Country Club in China (pictured at right) to Japan, where I went to work as the superintendent at Habu Country Club in Chiba prefecture.

Just before typhoon #15, I traveled to Okinawa to deliver a lecture about Turfgrass in the Ryukyu Islands at Ocean Expo Park. And despite the approaching typhoon – now passing Okinawa with winds over 130 miles per hour and with waves 50 feet high – there were 101 people in attendance in a packed room to hear about the turfgrasses of these islands, what makes this such a challenging place to produce good turfgrass (low photosynthetic irradiance), and the four steps that one can implement to optimize turfgrass performance under these conditions.

This short video will be of interest to golf course architects, superintendents, and anyone involved in the management or development of golf courses in tropical and sub-tropical Asia. Cut to just eight minutes in duration, it is a narrated walk along 5 km of Ishigaki island coastline, describing the grasses encountered and showing the ecological setting in which these grasses grow naturally.