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.
You’ve seen the trailer and heard the bleeps. Now, you can watch the full episode. This is “Flying Blind”, Episode 3 in Season 1 of my Grammar of Greenkeeping show.
Today I gave a seminar at the Thai GCSA meeting.
Photo by Boy Yothin These are the slides in Thai.
And these are the slides in English.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
That’s a generalization of Goodhart’s law. I’m an advocate of measuring some surface performance, plant, and soil parameters.
Here are data from 903 measurements I’ve made from 2011 to early 2021 excluding all tournament measurements.
Table 1: Number of measurements and median green speed in feet, by species. Data from 867 stimpmeter readings by Micah Woods excluding tournament measurements.
Golf course putting greens are covered with many types of grasses. I’ve written about my skepticism that adding Si will increase green speed in 3 posts on the blog (post 1, post 2, post 3), and I’ve done so in reference to Zoysia matrella greens which are known for the high silica content of the leaves.
A correspondent wrote to ask about the ever popular topic of Si and green speed:
Pretty sure I already know the answer to this, but I had a conversation with our rep from […] fertilizer company about my frustration in not being able to increase our green speed […].
Beth Guertal wrote to me a couple weeks ago:
“I liked your Si blog post of recent date. It made me go back and find some data I collected once upon a while.
While Eric Reasor was collecting the data on ball roll dispersion in Thailand – read yesterday’s post for more about that – I collected data on the the same greens. The data summary shown here are the data I collected from 19 greens on 19 different courses.
This is something that has never made sense to me. Actually, it seems ridiculous. Zoysia greens are not renowned for being especially fast. But zoysia has especially high silica content in the leaves.