fertilizer

I received this note from the ASHS last week: Conference Recordings are now available All sessions that were audio recorded during the conference are now available for listening. Click here to access the recordings.

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.

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.

When Andrew McDaniel wrote about #MLSN greens, I thought it may be interesting to show a few details of what this is about: These #MLSN greens are about to take 34 mows/21 rolls in 2 weeks.

I don’t often write about this, because I assume everyone knows it. But I’ve read a few things recently about amazing sums of money being saved by changing the way of fertilizing, all while getting the same or better turf conditions.

When I received the question about tissue testing, I replied that I would write a more detailed explanation later on the blog. I’ve tried to do this here without resorting to numbers or charts.

Yesterday I wrote of tissue testing (or more specifically, leaf nutrient analysis) that “I don’t like making nutrient application decisions” based on it and “I would not do routine tissue testing if I were a golf course superintendent.

This question arrived by e-mail: “I have a couple questions – A colleague and I in this area have been reducing N usage and tracking clipping yields for almost 2 years.

It’s not pretty. In fact, the grass gets horrendous in a hurry when it runs out of potassium (K). Which is why, as a turfgrass manager, one wants to make sure the grass is always supplied with enough K.

After last week’s post about the soil test levels where P deficiency symptoms were seen, Paul Johnson wrote to remind me about another experiment: “This is always a topic of interest to me, beginning with the study I did in the early 2000s.