potassium

I received an interesting question about some soil test results. Hey Micah, I’m just looking at the soil test results again … is there anything to worry about regarding sodium (Na) being higher than potassium (K)?

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.

A colleague from Canada wrote to me with five comments after finishing this ATC Office Hours with Chris Tritabaugh (or listen as a podcast here). Just listened to your talk with Chris and wish I had the where about to attend it live, as I would have kept the chat room real busy!

This is a good one. Sand rootzones with low cation exchange capacity (CEC) don’t have a large amount of exchangeable potassium (K), for the simple reason that sands have a low CEC.

You’ve probably listened to one of my seminars in which I explained why conventional nutrient guidelines for turfgrass are broken. Jackie Guevara’s thesis on “Effects of Different Soil Testing Philosophies on Creeping Bentgrass and Annual Bluegrass Putting Greens” is an excellent demonstration of this.

On February 28, 2020, I cut some Wana manilagrass rhizomes to a two node length and planted those two node rhizomes in four sand-filled pots. After eight days, I applied the first fertilizer treatment.

The recording of my seminar about “How MLSN Works” is now available on YouTube. I want to correct something. At the very end, I misstated that irrigation water normally has 20 to 60 ppm (mg/L) potassium.

I made a few small updates to the MLSN K calculator. This was the first Shiny app I made, back in 2014. You can see all of them—the Turf Twitter ones, the Hargreaves ET calculator, irrigation requirement demos, PACE Turf’s GP avatar generator, and more, at the ATC Shiny apps page.

Monthly soil and leaf samples were collected from the 11th green at Keya Golf Club during the 2019 growing season. Andrew McDaniel and I wanted to look at the annual range of values, and changes over time, for soil and leaf nutrients.

A friend gave me a beautiful card yesterday and wrote “perhaps you can use this Taraxacum officinale [dandelion] in some capacity.” I certainly can. Contining with the topic of my last post—cases in which low nutrient levels are desirable—the mention of dandelions reminds me of another case in which I’d adjust fertilizer recommendations.