Zoysia

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:

Planting rates for grass stolons are usually described as bushels per acre in the USA, I think. In Thailand, the rates are often described as mass of stolons, i.e. kg/m2.

I don’t often write about this, because I assume everyone knows it. But I’ve read a few things recently about amazing sums of money being saved by changing the way of fertilizing, all while getting the same or better turf conditions.

The KBC Augusta tournament is next week (August 24 to 27) on the Japan Golf Tour. There are a lot of reasons why it is a lot more than an average tournament.

The KBC Augusta tournament is coming up next week at Keya Golf Club in Fukuoka. The volume of grass clippings cut from the greens is measured every morning. I think it is interesting to look at the density of the measurements.

The standard for measuring how much a turf sward is growing is to take the dry weight of the clippings mown off the turf. This isn’t a realistic option for routine turf management because who has drying ovens?

I went for a run to the ocean at Cerro Gordo. As is my wont, I looked for grasses along the way. There were lots of zoysia lawns where I started.

I took 82 flights in 2016, for a total of 221,494 km (137,000 miles), and I’ve just mapped them. That’s more than 5 times the circumference of the earth. Routes flown once are more blue, and the routes flown more often are more red.

I don’t like turf diseases. If there is any fun in them, for me, it lies in only two things. First, is it a particularly well-named disease? Second, how awful are the symptoms?

Fred Varcoe wrote about putting greens on Japanese golf courses in the August 2016 issue of Euro Biz Japan. The article, [Know your greens (pdf, 3 MB)][1], includes some quotes from me about bentgrass, korai, and how balls roll on putting greens.