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As a follow-up to part 1 of this extraordinary interview with Don Mahaffey on Golf Club Atlas, here’s part 2. Don knows the golf and grass-growing business from the ground up, and he knows what he is talking about.

Growing up and first working in the turfgrass industry in the United States, I naturally used US customary units: inches and feet, pounds and ounces, fluid ounces and gallons and so on.

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.

This question about lowering leaf temperature prompted an extensive discussion about the effectiveness of syringing greens. When I was a greenkeeper, I used to syringe1 greens on hot summer afternoons.

That’s a bit of a trick question, because the answer I give is: neither. What one wants to do is apply the optimum amount of water to the turf, and that can be done by light and frequent irrigation, or it can be done by deep and infrequent irrigation.

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.

After a month of research and writing in southern Japan—my 2012 summer sabbatical—I returned to Thailand, got my mail, and in that accumulated stack of papers I found (and promptly read) the July 2012 issue of Golf Course Architecture.

This is a two part mystery, the first part of which I’ll speculate as to the answer, and the second part for which I’ll ask for expert advice (or guesses!

We can look at temperature data for Seoul and Philadelphia and we find that the average temperatures throughout the year have almost complete overlap. So we might expect that with such similar temperatures on a month by month basis, the grasses used in those cities would be similar.

I was the golf course superintendent at Habu CC in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo from September 2000 to August 2001. Ten years later, I’m spending this summer at Japan, partly to study and collect data about turfgrass performance, but also to remember what it is like to be a superintendent.