research

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.

A late July solid-tine spiking treatment of a creeping bentgrass green in Hokkaido, Japan. How’s this for a lede? “Hollow-tine coring and solid-tine spiking practices may not alleviate creeping bentgrass summer decline.

After I wrote the seven part series about soil sampling for turfgrass, I formatted the posts into an easy-to-read 11 page PDF brochure. The take-home message is yes, we’ve been doing it wrong.

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.

The N-only pot looked pretty good when I showed roots after 184 days. But that same grass grew a lot more, and produced a lot more underground roots and rhizomes, when P and K were added.

Regular readers of this site will remember the grow-in experiment I started on 1 October 2019. I wrote about it in these posts. Fertilizer response at planting Experiment update: fertilizer response at planting

The summary so far is this: standard recommendations for turfgrass sampling are to take 12 or more cores from each area and composite them into one sample I’ve been taking 5 cores and compositing them Donohue’s research in Virginia led him to recommend taking 20 subsamples and compositing them The article by Lawrence et al.

Now this series gets interesting. I’ve reviewed what I do, what a Twitter survey says people are doing, what Rutgers and Penn State recommend, and what an intensively sampled lawn in Virginia suggests would be an appropriate number of subsamples to combine in composite samples for turfgrass.