Is it necessary?
We need to be able to answer that question...
A few days ago, Paul Van Buren, aka HarryLigule responded to my “Are They Right?” post with the following tweet.
I will preface this post with the fact I asked Paul for permission to use his tweet. I mean no offense to Paul, or anyone for that matter, but his tweet made me want to ask the question: why are we too afraid to skip disruptive cultural practices?
I don’t know the answer, nor am I advocating for a blanket elimination of disruption. There are many turf maladies which I myself solved with some combination of cultural practices and disruption of the surface. But what about those situations when there isn’t a problem? What about a putting green in perfect condition: 100% turf cover, no compaction, OM at reasonable levels, is disruption the answer in such a situation? Is the green good because of previously performed cultural practices? Can the previous practices be done half as much? Less? Can they be eliminated?
We should be able to answer these questions. We should know what is really necessary to produce the best conditions day after day. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment and we can discuss.
I like the idea of questioning what processes are necessary. I have been testing all twenty greens with the loss on ignition method to monitor the organic levels in all our greens for a couple of seasons now. With a few seasons of this information, I can see that some greens may require more aeration than others. Something as simple as going at a closer spacing on a particular green to attempt to manage additional organic matter can have the potential to be very valuable. It's much easier to maintain good levels of organics, than it is to play catch up, if things get too far out of hand.
On a sand based putting green, in Minnesota or any state with an off season that comes with frost in the ground, would you expect to potentially see compaction? I would think since it’s sand based and we have a decompacting freeze thaw already built into the weather, compaction wouldn’t be an issue. On top of using OM246 to monitor OM, should I be taking data on compaction on greens to justify not cultivating if that’s where our OM is at? What would that data collection look like?