Fertilizer

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

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.

I usually enjoy doing experiments. But there’s one that I helped out with as a graduate student that wasn’t any fun at all. Dr. Frank Rossi wrote about this in Effects of microbial and organic products on putting green performance.

I asked a question in the MLSN newsletter1 — when getting a recommendation for nutrients, would it make more sense to have that recommendation expressed as a ratio or as a percentage?

Have you ever seen seedheads on zoysia? Have you ever planted zoysia sod and seen a lot of seeds on some pieces but not on others? I’ve seen this a lot, and I’m not the only one.

Here are three primary things to be concerned with when considering soil and water: salinity, the sodium hazard, and nutrient deficiencies. I explain solutions for each of these problems in this post, which was originally a handout for a seminar I gave on this topic some years ago.