soil

This is an extraordinarily good video about grasses, mowing, construction, irrigation, soils, playability, maintenance cost, and more. If you are interested in these topics, watch this interview with Don Mahaffey.

Update: I’m adding a note here today (21 Nov 2017) to correct and clarify about these data. Mike Richardson pointed out to me that the “differences from plots irrigated to field capacity 2X or 6X / wk were small and not significant” in this experiment.

At a Vancouver Island Golf Superintendent Association meeting in spring 2014, I spoke about turfgrass nutrient requirements. The question a turfgrass manager must answer is this one: Can the soil supply enough of an element to meet the grass requirements, and if it cannot, then how much of the element must be applied as fertilizer?

Why use and pay for nutrients that the grass does not need or the soil does not require? That question, along with the title of this post, are quotes from the classic article by Zontek et al.

Sand rootzones are common the world over for golf course putting greens. Many athletic fields are also built with a sand rootzone, and in Asia, many of the tees, fairways, and even roughs are grown in a sand rootzone.

Do you ever think about fertilizer cost? The amount people spend varies a lot. Jason Haines, for example, has explained how he reduced fertilizer costs by 60%: I have to say, this new way of doing things is working a lot better than the old way.

I read a post on the Golfdom Daily about soil pH in which it was suggested that it was important to maintain soil pH in the range from 6.5 to 7.

This soil profile, showing how the soil has been modified after about 70 years of management as a golf course putting green, is absolutely fascinating. This photo is from a course in Sydney, Australia.

Cation exchange capacity (CEC) is important because it is a measure of the nutrient holding capacity of a soil. I was reminded by this paper A Simple Method for Estimating Cation Exchange Capacity Across a Wide Range of Soils, showed the results of experiments on estimating CEC on a range of fifty different soils from around New York state.