soil

When the soil doesn’t have much phosphorus, establishing grass almost always responds to the application of P fertilizer. When the soil doesn’t have much phosphorus, established grass often performs perfectly fine without the addition of any P fertilizer.

I realized it’s the end of April and I haven’t written any new posts on the ATC site this month. Here are some recent updates I’ve published at PACE Turf, which cover a wide range of topics.

Don’t overthink your soil biology writes Andrew McGuire in a blog post with that title. I recommend you read the entire article. I’ll include a few quotes here. He notes three common errors around soil biology.

I wrote about this topic five months ago at PACE Turf. Dollar spot: reduced disease severity with reduced fungicides In that update, I shared some key points from Chou et al.

Andrew McGuire, an agronomist with Washington State University, wrote that bio-products are “risky because decades of experience and research have found these products fail, or fail inconsistently, or have small benefits that don’t cover their cost.

Layers in the rootzone are supposed to be bad. The images above and below look awful, don’t they? A layer like that could inhibit rooting, stop water flow, and all kinds of things.

I understand there are a lot of different ways to manage grass. One way involves measuring infiltration rate. That’s not the way I do it. There are eight things1 I do like to measure.

A correspondent wrote with a question about soil biology for controlling organics, adding compost tea to feed beneficial bacteria, and etc. There are two articles that I recommend as an introduction to this topic, both by David Zuberer.

Regular readers of this blog will be familar with some previous attempts to estimate the N mineralization in turfgrass soils. There was this from 2010, which I wrote about in 2015 saying “I wouldn’t explain it this way again.

It’s always a good idea to know what the soil temperature is. One can measure it, or one can be confident that the average daily soil temperature close to the surface (5 cm, or 2 inch depth) is higher than the daily low temperature, and lower than the daily high temperature.