Japan

I had an open discussion today with a group of greenkeepers in Japan. We talked about a lot of things – bentgrass in summer, irrigation, fertilizer, organic matter management, roots, etc.

When Andrew McDaniel wrote about #MLSN greens, I thought it may be interesting to show a few details of what this is about: Keya GC hosts a golf tournament each year at the end of August.

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.

The KBC Augusta tournament is next week (August 24 to 27) on the Japan Golf Tour. There are a lot of reasons why it is a lot more than an average tournament.

The standard for measuring how much a turf sward is growing is to take the dry weight of the clippings mown off the turf. This isn’t a realistic option for routine turf management because who has drying ovens?

The idea that golf courses in Japan with the two green system have a summer green and a winter green is not quite correct. Nor is the two green system used exclusively with one warm-season grass green and one with cool-season grass.

I went for a run to the ocean at Cerro Gordo. As is my wont, I looked for grasses along the way. There were lots of zoysia lawns where I started.

is now available, and I see from the Amazon.co.jp website that it can be shipped to any country. The full title is 芝草科学とグリーンキーピング (マイカの時間 The BOOK). In English that is Turfgrass Science and Greenkeeping (Micah no jikan The Book).

Steve Chappell shared these photos of snow and ice at Gleneagles, and I joked that it would be nice to play golf in such weather: For example, see Jim Prusa’s video of snow removal at SKY72 in Korea.

I took 82 flights in 2016, for a total of 221,494 km (137,000 miles), and I’ve just mapped them. That’s more than 5 times the circumference of the earth. Routes flown once are more blue, and the routes flown more often are more red.