Research

A project that investigated soil nutrient levels of good-performing turf all over the world.

Here are direct quotes from books and articles over the past 50 years. Do you notice a trend here? Actually, trend might not be the correct word. I’ll rephrase it like this: do you notice the persistence of an unsolved problem?

Korai (Zoysia) putting greens have a distinctive roll because of the stiff leaf blades. One consequence of this is a slower green speed than bermudagrass when given the same maintenance.

I usually enjoy doing experiments. But there’s one that I helped out with as a graduate student that wasn’t any fun at all. Dr. Frank Rossi wrote about this in Effects of microbial and organic products on putting green performance.

I get to see a lot of bermudagrass and zoysiagrass putting greens. In fact, most of my golf is played on one of those two surfaces. Sometimes people ask me about the ball roll on zoysia compared with roll on bermudagrass.

Perspective. It’s funny how that works. When I first read this research report in 2011, I skimmed over some parts, and cherry-picked what I was looking for — that 15 to 20% surface area removal was required every year in order to keep soil organic matter under control.

A recent PACE Turf update mentioned this research project by Jackie Guevara and Kevin Frank: Effects of different soil testing interpretation philosophies on creeping bentgrass and annual bluegrass putting greens.

On February 28, I took Wana—a fine-bladed putting green type manilagrass—rhizomes and cut to a two node length. Then I planted these cut rhizomes, each with two tiny plants on them, in the center of sand-filled pots.

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.

You may have seen a few posts about #rturf on my personal site. I’m writing about that topic over there so I don’t clutter up the ATC site with too much data analysis and computer code.