Tissue test

Doug Soldat joined me for an ATC Office Hours discussion about leaf nutrient analyses (tissue testing) for turfgrass. I’ve embedded the video at the end of this post, link to it here, or listen to the podcast version here.

Soil nutrient analyses—soil tests—are used to determine if certain elements are required as fertilizer. If an element is required as fertilizer, the soil test will be interpreted to make a recommendation for the quantity of the element required.

The median blog post on this site in 2019 got 244 views. And there were a few up around 1,000 to 2,000 views. There were these top 10 that everyone read.

There’s an interesting blog post by Jim Orson titled “Read this before leaf tissue testing for micronutrients.” The entire post is worth reading. It describes his conclusions after studying the result of 15 trials with winter wheat.

This inquiry came by email under the heading of “MLSN for leaf tissue.” Dear Micah, hope you are fine, it has been a while since we talked last. I must say that I have seen quite a lot of analyses of turf soil with good characteristics and fertilizer levels close to your MLSN.

I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago about turfgrass nutrition. The conversation was wide-ranging, from fertilizer, to soil testing, and then the question came up, “what do you think about tissue testing?

When I received the question about tissue testing, I replied that I would write a more detailed explanation later on the blog. I’ve tried to do this here without resorting to numbers or charts.

Yesterday I wrote of tissue testing (or more specifically, leaf nutrient analysis) that “I don’t like making nutrient application decisions” based on it and “I would not do routine tissue testing if I were a golf course superintendent.

This question arrived by e-mail: “I have a couple questions – A colleague and I in this area have been reducing N usage and tracking clipping yields for almost 2 years.