Thailand

Last month I made a trip to Hua Hin and visited two of the fine golf courses there—Royal Hua Hin GC and Banyan GC (now Pineapple Valley GC Hua Hin).

Last year I wrote about a soil temperature turfhack. The soil temperature is almost always between the day’s high and low temperature. The soil temperature at a 5 cm depth immediately after planting manilagrass stolons on 22 April.

Mike Richardson shared an image of aerifying half a green at a time. The purpose of this, the superintendent said, was to always have a good surface for the hole.

As I say at the end of every year, it was another extraordinary year for studying grass around the world. In 2018 I took 107 flights for a total distance of 314,748 km (195,575 miles).

These are the slides and handout for my seminar tomorrow in Bangkok. I don’t expect to record a screencast video of this presentation; the handout is 5 pages and covers most of what I expect to discuss.

This is an interesting story about a common grass that rarely appears in a lawn as just a single species – as a monostand. But at an especially high profile location in Bangkok, the lawns are almost pure javagrass (Polytrias indica).

I was wondering when it usually rains in Bangkok. The climatological normals for Bangkok show that there is a six month dry season from November to April, in which the average precipitation in each month is less than 100 mm (4 inches).

As I say at the end of every year, it has been another extraordinary year for studying grass around the world. See these links for some of my favorite photos (and flight maps) from 2015 and 2016.

Yesterday I wrote that bermudagrass fairways in Thailand wouldn’t be as good as they are in the Algarve because of climate differences. The cumulative rain so far this year makes a nice illustration of this.

There are a variety of grasses used for lawns and sports turf in central Thailand. I gave a presentation last week at the American Society for Horticultural Science annual meeting about the growth of three of those grasses: