Mowing

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.

You won’t find these at every golf course in Japan, but it is common to see a green condition (グリーンコンディション) information board prominently displayed at the clubhouse. The Facebook page for Monthly Golf Management magazine (月刊ゴルフマネジメント) shared a beautiful photo gallery with representative examples of these green condition boards.

I’ve written about getting around the golf course on a sulky, but an even more common method of transport is the kei truck. It’s convenient to use kei trucks. A kei truck easily transports two people and two walking mowers, plus clipping volume buckets and other accessories, like the ramps that are used to roll the mowers into the bed of the truck.

Bill Kreuser shared a fascinating update from one of the experiments he is conducting this summer. I wouldn’t have expected to see such a big difference in growth rate with a mowing height difference of 0.

Last week I had a couple conversations about green speed. Green speed and surface hardness My column in the June 2018 issue of Golf Course Seminar magazine discusses the relationship between effective mowing height and green speed.

Yesterday I responded to two questions related to carbon emissions associated with electricity generation. This was part of a broader discussion started by Jason Haines about small electric autonomous mowers.

Jason Haines has written recently about The future of robot mowers today and I recommend having a read of that post for more insight, and some videos of these types of machines.

A full year of putting green clipping volume measurements looks like this. Well, it’s like that with a number of caveats. This is what it looked like:

When I led a seminar in Idaho last month about Turf Around the World, I wanted to show a map of the flights I’d taken this year. I didn’t have a map to show then, however, because of some software problems.

Here are data from 903 measurements I’ve made from 2011 to early 2021 excluding all tournament measurements. Table 1: Number of measurements and median green speed in feet, by species. Data from 867 stimpmeter readings by Micah Woods excluding tournament measurements.