nitrogen

An anonymous golf course superintendent sent me this message: I’m blown away by the quality of these surfaces with an amount of nitrogen I would’ve thought was far too small.

From July 3 to July 10, I visited 11 golf facilities in Japan. I asked some basic questions to the greenkeeper at each course. The answers to the questions help me to understand what the greenkeeper is working with, and how many resources are available to get the job done.

When a lot of nitrogen is applied relative to plant demand, I guess. The article Creeping bentgrass surface properties following aerification by Hubbard et al. reports the results of an experiment looking at various aerification treatments, tine diameters, and tine spacings on a `Crenshaw’ creeping bentgrass green at Clemson, South Carolina.

For a few years now, when I have private discussions about the type of putting green maintenance that involves few or no holes punched in the surface and minimal sand topdressing, I often hear this response.

After the 2014 GCSAA nutrient survey, I wrote a blog post titled “maybe those that soil test are just more likely to fertilize in general?” I made the case that although they might be more likely to fertilize, there seemed to be an effect of soil testing on that too, at least for K.

A pound of nitrogen. That’s a substantial amount of N, right? Apply a pound of N in a single application and that’s going to create a lot of growth—way too much growth in most cases—and may lead to some thatch production.

This topic—carbon in turfgrass soils—was the subject of a Frankly Speaking podcast episode. One of the topics host Frank Rossi spoke about with guests Drs. Claire Phillips and Alec Kowalewski was the nitrogen mineralized from soil organic matter.

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.

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot. It seems obvious that a sward supplied with more nitrogen fertilizer will tend to produce more organic material in the soil. It also seems obvious that a sward on which hollow-tine cultivation, or scarification, or sand topdressing, have been conducted, will need to receive more nitrogen in order to produce a surface compared with an adjacent sward that didn’t receive any of that work.

Doug Soldat joined me for an ATC Office Hours discussion about leaf nutrient analyses (tissue testing) for turfgrass. I’ve embedded the video at the end of this post, link to it here, or listen to the podcast version here.