playability

I brought my measuring tools to Fukuoka Raizan Golf Club last week. I measured green speed before and after tournament play with the stimpmeter, among other measurements. Here are some of the observations I made during the JLPGA’s Sky RKB Ladies Classic tournament.

I was a guest on the USGA Green Section podcast for an episode with the title Hot Takes on Turf with Dr. Micah Woods. Host John Petrovsky asked a range of questions that I found quite interesting, and I hope you will too.

A question came in about green speed. I paraphrase it here: If our peak season target is 10. What is a reasonable deviation from that? We would then aim to hit that 80% of the time to account for weather and cultural practices.

I really enjoyed listening to Rodney Lingle on the USGA Green Section Podcast. This is a podcast I recommend you all put in your listening queue. Host John Petrovsky leads the conversation in all the directions you’d want it to go.

If you want to have control of green speed, you need to have the growth rate under control. When fewer clippings are being removed from the greens at each mow, the green speed measured by the stimpmeter will be faster.

Many of you will have heard the announcement from Joe Gulotti that The Talking Greenkeeper is on hiatus. A lot of us enjoyed hearing from Joe and his guests almost every week, and we are going to miss it.

I talked with Frank Rossi today on the ATC Doublecut. You can watch or listen to the show at the links. We discussed potassium (K) fertilizer, and why there are still recommendations for so much more K than the grass can use.

I’ve not been an advocate for zoysiagrass (korai) greens when bermudagrass greens are a viable option. The reason for this is ball roll. With the same maintenance, bermudagrass greens have a noticeably smoother and faster ball roll.

I was a guest on The Tie podcast where I spoke with Walker Simas about “Turf for Dummies.” Well, not quite to that extreme. We still managed to cover a lot of greenkeeping topics, but perhaps I explained the topics in a less technical way.

Slides You can download the slides here: Modern methods for real world data collection to improve input efficiencies and turf playability, 4.7 MB PDF file Notes During the seminar, I mentioned adjusting N rates by checking the actual clipping volume compared with the desired clipping volume.