Manilagrass

Have you ever seen seedheads on zoysia? Have you ever planted zoysia sod and seen a lot of seeds on some pieces but not on others? I’ve seen this a lot, and I’m not the only one.

Last year I wrote about manilagrass (Zoysia matrella) sod on highway medians in Thailand. I showed photos of a recently planted median, and explained why zoysia doesn’t persist in this environment when maintained without supplemental irrigation and regular mowing.

This is usually where I show a map with all my flights, mention that they took me some hundred thousands of kilometers, and then share some of my favorite turf photos from all the places I went.

I’ve been using the NASA POWER agroclimatology data for a few projects. I get the data using the convenient nasapower R package by Adam Sparks. There is also a web-based map data access viewer.

I’ve seen a lot of highways in Thailand. Highway medians are sodded with manilagrass (Zoysia matrella) as a matter of course (more about the cost of that below). I’ve seen some impressive vistas of this work in past years, but for safety reasons haven’t been able to get any photos.

Yesterday I took a walk around a golf course in Chonburi, Thailand. It is three months into the dry season at this location; there has been negligible rainfall in Chonburi since the start of November.

At the end of every year, I like to look at my flight map and at some of my favorite turf photos. In 2019 I was on 56 flights over 161,473 km (100,335 miles).

As I say at the end of every year, it was another extraordinary year for studying grass around the world. In 2018 I took 107 flights for a total distance of 314,748 km (195,575 miles).

I’ve been asked about zoysia suitability for California, particularly northern parts of California, many times. Every time, I give the same answer. In such a relatively cool climate, and in such a relatively sunny and dry climate, Cynodon seems like a much better choice.

I noticed something interesting on the lawn of a resort at Ko Kood earlier this month. Looking down from the “Beware of falling coconuts” signs, I noticed that the southern section of lawn was primarily seashore paspalum, and that section of lawn was infested with a variety of weeds.