weeds

Have you heard about the Park Grass experiment? The one that started in 1856 with different fertilizer treatments applied to a hay meadow in England, with those fertilizer treatments applied year after year to see what happened to hay yields?

A friend gave me a beautiful card yesterday and wrote “perhaps you can use this Taraxacum officinale [dandelion] in some capacity.” I certainly can. Contining with the topic of my last post—cases in which low nutrient levels are desirable—the mention of dandelions reminds me of another case in which I’d adjust fertilizer recommendations.

I really enjoyed listening to Frank Rossi and Jim Brosnan discuss weed control, Poa annua, herbicide resistance, and glyphosate in their recent discussion on TurfNet’s Frankly Speaking. I’d recommend listening to this to learn more about some important turfgrass management challenges and the research being done right now to find solutions.

When I was reading the 1952 report of the “Turf Committee” from that year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Agronomy, I was looking specifically for use of the word turf, or turf grass, or turfgrass.

I noticed something interesting on the lawn of a resort at Ko Kood earlier this month. Looking down from the “Beware of falling coconuts” signs, I noticed that the southern section of lawn was primarily seashore paspalum, and that section of lawn was infested with a variety of weeds.

I was browsing the Sir John Bennet Lawes timeline and discovered this excellent video with plant ecologist Jonathan Storkey introducing the Park Grass Experiment. The Park Grass experiment at Rothamsted was started in 1856 and has been continuously monitored ever since.

Frank Rossi and I wrote this article about the Park Grass experiment. This experiment has been ongoing since 1856. It involves fertilizer treatments applied to grassland and the many measurements that have been made over the years on the experimental plots.