firmness

A correspondent wrote with a question about firmness and compaction, about managing the balance between them, and whether there is a difference when analyzing a rootzone. Bouncing a ball on a green with excellent firmness, but what about compaction?

There are a lot of factors involved with managing the firmness of turfgrass surfaces. I’ve been making a lot of measurements of firmness recently—actually I’ve been measuring this for a long time, come to think of it—and I share some of my recent observations in two PACE Turf updates and in this video.

As we have done for each KBC Augusta Tournament we’ve worked together, Andrew McDaniel and I went to Natty Dread for lunch at the start of the week. This year the tournament will be played on greens that haven’t been sand topdressed for fourteen months—the last topdressing was early summer of 2025.

I was in Melbourne at the end of last week and had a chance to visit some courses. I went to two courses on Thursday and didn’t record any videos. Then we had an idea over dinner on Thursday night—maybe we should do some Cart Rides on Friday.