greenkeeping

My books about greenkeeping, turfgrass science, clipping volume, and MLSN.

In the first seven episodes of the Turf Without Borders show, we’ve talked with turf managers working in Scotland, India, Dubai, Canada, New Zealand, Iceland, and the Philippines. Full episode list If you enjoy the show, please rate and review it on the podcast apps.

There’s nothing new about trying to minimize surface disruption while producing enjoyable surfaces. I was reminded of this while rereading the report of the Turf Committee from the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Agronomy:

I’m lucky. I get to visit a lot of golf courses. When I visit a course, I ask a series of questions that helps me to understand more about the property, the superintendent, and the grass.

I worked at golf tournaments in consecutive weeks, first at Hazeltine National Golf Club during the U.S. Amateur Championship, and then flew to Japan to work at Keya Golf Club for the KBC Augusta Tournament.

You may be familiar with the grammar of greenkeeping. That’s what I call the approach to turfgrass maintenance that focuses on growth rate. As I wrote in the preface to the book with that title:

I use a method based on clipping harvest and normal leaf nitrogen content to find the estimated nitrogen harvest. I adjust this based on species, because there are differences in the clipping volume to dry mass conversion based on what type of leaf we are working with.

T-Jay Creamer is the golf course superintendent at Olympic View GC in Victoria, British Columbia. The greens there are a mix of bentgrass and Poa annua, and as of May 2024 it’s considerably more Poa than bent.

When a creeping bentgrass green is sixteen years old, do you expect to find some Poa annua in it? I do. When I see greens that age without noticing any Poa plants, I pay attention.

Slides You can download the slides here: Systematic improvement of golf course conditions, 4.2 MB PDF file Systematic improvement notes With routine measurement of surface conditions, it’s possible to adjust the work in a systematic way to make the conditions better, for more days in the year, than I once thought possible.