growth potential

I’ve had the pleasure of studying and discussing turfgrass management and turfgrass science with professionals in some pretty salubrious places. In fact, I make a point of doing so, and last month Dr.

Did you know there are different ways to calculate the average daily temperature? A new PACE Turf update discusses this. In that update, I looked at the daily minimum and maximum method, and compared it to the average of hourly measurements method.

A lot of turfgrass nutrition research gets done with fixed rates of fertilizer applied on a fixed time schedule. It always seemed normal for me to fertilize this way. Here are a few examples.

The PACE Turf temperature-based growth potential, or GP, is a utility function that takes the input of average air temperature, and gives an output of GP on a scale of 0 to 1, or 0 to 100%.

I’ve written before about ΔGP. That’s read as “delta G P” and it is the difference in the cool-season and the warm-season growth potential. Specifically, it is the cool-season GP first, then the warm-season GP is subtracted from that.

You may have seen the maps of monthly growth potential through the seasons from PACE Turf. Those animated maps take the average temperature, convert it to a growth potential, and then color code a map of the USA with that animation.

I made my first visit to Myrtle Beach two weeks ago for a seminar with the Palmetto GCSA at Horry-Georgetown Technical College. I knew there were a lot of golf courses in the Myrtle Beach area, but until I visited in April and saw all the ryegrass, I didn’t realize that so many courses there overseed in the autumn.

Figure 1. The snow-covered landscape of central Hokkaido in mid-March 2024 when the growth potential was 0 but the DLI was fine. In a recent ATC Doublecut discussing light and temperature, I mentioned that I’d calculate potential DLI for the recording location, check the actual DLI for the recording location, and share that information.

A question that comes up again and again is whether the PACE Turf growth potential (GP) would be improved by also accounting for light. Grass growth—plant growth of any type, actually—is influenced by more than temperature.

I know this can use more explanation, because I’ve heard people refer to “their MLSN N” as being some amount. When I first heard that, I was taken aback, because nitrogen (N) is explicitly not part of MLSN.