soil

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.

Irrigation water quality, salinity, gypsum, and sodium—I’m not even going to mention the problems that bicarbonate doesn’t cause—are topics that are sure to stir up some discussion. I’m writing this to put links to a few old posts about sodium and salinity into one place, and to share excerpts from three recent conversations that might clarify some solutions, and the simplicity of the solutions, especially when dealing with turf growing in a sand rootzone.

Jason Haines has been sharing some ideas on his Turf Hacker blog, and one that I think is especially interesting is the idea that one can precisely match the topdressing sand quantity to the growth of the grass.

I came across an interesting example as I was reading the ‘Internal Structure’ chapter in Joshua Schimel’s Writing Science. The example is a quotation from Nitrogen and Nature by Vitousek et al.

There is an interesting article about carbon by Bryan G. and Tyler J. Hopkins in Crops & Soils magazine. Here’s a quick summary, put together with a series of quotes from the article.