Fertilizer

Minimum levels for sustainable nutrition—MLSN—is a modern method for interpreting soil tests for turfgrass.

An anonymous golf course superintendent sent me this message: I’m blown away by the quality of these surfaces with an amount of nitrogen I would’ve thought was far too small.

Frank Rossi and Chris Tritabaugh had a short conversation about the fascinating Park Grass experiment, and about a lot more than that—fertilizer, bentgrass, dogma, salaries, budgets, detail work, GPS sprayers, and so on.

My advice is to test for soil nutrients at the time of the year when nutrient levels are likely to be at their lowest. In temperate climates in which there is some precipitation during the summer, then this is an autumn timing.

Here are direct quotes from books and articles over the past 50 years. Do you notice a trend here? Actually, trend might not be the correct word. I’ll rephrase it like this: do you notice the persistence of an unsolved problem?

Doug Soldat has been posting these spectacular photos every year. See the “related posts” section at the bottom for more of these from past years. When he shared this one, he wrote “stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

A pound of nitrogen. That’s a substantial amount of N, right? Apply a pound of N in a single application and that’s going to create a lot of growth—way too much growth in most cases—and may lead to some thatch production.

Have you heard about the Park Grass experiment? The one that started in 1856 with different fertilizer treatments applied to a hay meadow in England, with those fertilizer treatments applied year after year to see what happened to hay yields?

Daniel Hahn and Romain Giraud wrote an article on LinkedIn about fertilisation decisions based on MLSN and STERF’s precision fertilisation (SPF). If you are at all interested in this topic, I hope you’ll read their article.

I wrote an update about normal manganese (Mn) levels in soil and in turfgrass leaves. Mark Smith posted about Mn with some extraordinarily verdant grass and attributed the color to Mn.