Zoysia

I’ve seen a lot of highways in Thailand. Highway medians are sodded with manilagrass (Zoysia matrella) as a matter of course (more about the cost of that below). I’ve seen some impressive vistas of this work in past years, but for safety reasons haven’t been able to get any photos.

On February 28, I took Wana—a fine-bladed putting green type manilagrass—rhizomes and cut to a two node length. Then I planted these cut rhizomes, each with two tiny plants on them, in the center of sand-filled pots.

On February 28, 2020, I cut some Wana manilagrass rhizomes to a two node length and planted those two node rhizomes in four sand-filled pots. After eight days, I applied the first fertilizer treatment.

One of the things I’ve noticed when growing grasses in pots is the striking difference between aboveground stolons produced by bermudagrass, and underground rhizomes produced by zoysiagrass. These grasses were grown in pots and fertilized with N, P, and K.

You may have seen a few posts about #rturf on my personal site. I’m writing about that topic over there so I don’t clutter up the ATC site with too much data analysis and computer code.

Have you ever seen patches like this on Zoysia turf? Maybe the early stages of an intense large patch outbreak, or elephant’s footprint (Rhizoctonia cerealis) that got out of control? Way out of control?

When I play golf, I much prefer to walk, so the choice between walking and riding is usually an easy one. These all-terrain vehicles are staged near the first tee, ready for action.

I was talking with a golf course designer recently, and he mentioned that “zoysia starts to look pretty attractive because of its lower water use.” That led to a long conversation about how incorrect that statement is.

When I saw how these grasses were growing at #ATC南店, I jotted down a couple notes for a future blog post—this one. when grass grows more, it makes more roots

The N-only pot looked pretty good when I showed roots after 184 days. But that same grass grew a lot more, and produced a lot more underground roots and rhizomes, when P and K were added.