Golf course architects or developers may sometimes want to produce links-style courses with links-style playing surfaces. In East and Southeast Asia, the grass that should be used, if one wants to produce such surfaces, is manilagrass (Zoysia matrella). This fact sheet from the Asian Turfgrass Center explains why and includes links to photo galleries, case studies, and videos about this grass.
And while I agree with Paul that Vietnam is a great destination for tourism and for golf, my choice is Hokkaido for the best golfing destination in Asia. My recommendation comes with a caveat - the golfing season in Hokkaido is short. But what a season it is!
There are well over 150 golf courses to choose from in Hokkaido, across every price range. Many of the courses are great designs by famous designers for a very reasonable price.
In a country renowned for excellent food, Hokkaido stands out for having some of the best seafood, meat, fruit, and produce. The golfing experience in Japan usually includes a lunch at the clubhouse. At Brooks CC in Hokkaido, I had this amazing seafood ramen. In fact, it was the only ramen I've ever found worthy of a video.
Did I mention the weather? In other parts of East, South, and Southeast Asia, the months of May through October are generally hot and humid and in many places rainy. How about Hokkaido? Well, one can see snow on the distant mountains, in the spring there are cherry blossoms and other flowers, in the autumn there is beautiful color on the deciduous trees, and in mid-summer the average temperature is 20°C, which is almost 10 degrees cooler than other parts of Asia. In a word, I'd call it salubrious. The golfing season at Hokkaido is played in the most clement weather to be found in all of Asia.
This salubrious weather means cool-season grasses such as creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera) and kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis) and fine fescue (Festuca rubra) thrive in Hokkaido, and its courses are generally maintained at a high level. These grasses are usually considered to be the finest for high quality golfing surfaces the world over, but in many places the climate is too hot for these grasses. At Hokkaido, however, these high-quality grasses thrive. Many professional tournaments are held at the courses in Hokkaido, and in data I have collected from courses around the world, the green speed of courses in Hokkaido has been the highest. The excellent weather for creeping bentgrass means the greens can be kept fast during most of the playing season.
There is fine dining and a vibrant nightlife in the cities of Hokkaido, while on the courses one will regularly see deer, foxes, a plethora of birds, and even, perhaps, bears. The combination of so many excellent golf courses, nature, great food, and cool weather makes Hokkaido the best golfing destination in Asia - at least from May to October. But at the other times of the year, I'm going to Thailand!
Overseeding grass variety and fertilizer test area at Habu CC
I was looking through some photos of Habu CC, where I was the superintendent before going to graduate school at Cornell University, and I was reminded of the many tests and trials we conducted to determine the best way to produce the desired grass conditions. This was fun, it was useful in helping us to develop the most effective maintenance program for the course, and it didn't take a lot of time.
Nursery green at Habu CC with a test of potassium nitrate fertilizer on Penncross at left and test plots of creeping bentgrass and velvet bentgrass cultivars at right
In my time at Habu CC, I remember that we did tests, at various times, of:
fertilizers and microbial products
earthworm control products
creeping and velvet bentgrass performance tests
winter overseeding grass variety and seed rate tests
herbicides
Onsite testing at Habu CC helped the course maintenance team to produce the desired playing conditions
These tests did not take much time, but we learned a lot. I encourage all turfgrass managers to test products and practices to discover the most effective way to do things at a particular site.
This week I spoke to a full room of turfgrass managers at Bangkok's Thana City Golf and Sport Club about an important topic: understanding data for use in turfgrass management. I've recorded this video of the presentation slides in which I discuss the two classes of data that can be collected – data about playing surface performance, or data about plant growth – and then I go into some detail about soil moisture and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), with a brief mention of salinity and soil pH at the end.
There were many questions and an active discussion in this seminar and in fact lunch time arrived before I could speak about salinity and soil pH, so this video provides the narration of what I would have talked about had there been more time.
David Lau from Spectrum Technologies, pictured with me at right, gave an interesting presentation in which he talked about a broad range of meters and software that can be used to collect and analyze information for improving turfgrass performance. This is part of what PACE Turf call Precision Turfgrass Management (PTM), which is a systematic effort to provide optimum turf performance using minimum resources. As David mentioned, we cannot manage something if we do not measure it.
Today was an especially hot day at Bangkok. I went out for lunch, and when I was driving home I noticed that the thermometer on my dashboard was indicating an outside temperature of 42°C. Upon arriving home, I checked the official temperature, found it to be 38°C, and I promptly went outside with my infrared thermometer to measure the surface temperature of concrete and of grass. See the above image at full size here.
These measurements were made at 14:00. The concrete measured 53.6°C, about 15°C above the air temperature. Manilagrass (Zoysia matrella) wilting in the sun had a similar temperature, 48.8°C, more than 10°C above the air temperature. Meanwhile, manilagrass and carpetgrass (Axonopus compressus) in the same lawn, in areas with adequate water so the grass could transpire, had leaf temperatures ranging from 1.8°C below to 1.2°C above the ambient air temperature.
As part of a putting green performance data research project, I've collected leaf temperature data from hundreds of greens across multiple grass species in many countries. As of today, I've measured the surface temperature 802 times. If you are interested in reading more, these data are summarized beginning on page 21 of this report. It has been my observation that in conditions of full sun, minimal wind, and adequate plant water status, meaning the grass leaves are not wilting, no matter how hight the ambient air temperature, the leaf temperature will generally be within 1°C or 2°C of the air temperature. Have you ever measured anything different?
This video shows how manilagrass (Zoysia matrella) is planted, grown, and harvested on Thailand's sod farms. Manilagrass is used throughout East and Southeast Asia on lawns, parks, golf courses, sports fields, roadsides, and cemeteries. What is especially remarkable about this method of production is the time it takes from planting to harvest. During the summer when the temperatures are at a maximum and the grass can grow quickly, harvestable manilagrass sod is ready 30 days after planting. During winter, when the temperatures are cooler, it takes about 40 days from planting to harvest.
I was at Korea last week, where I visited six different golf clubs. Two were 18 hole facilities, one of which is under construction, one has 9 holes and is open 24 hours a day for half the year, two have 36 holes, and one has 72 holes.
That is Sky72 Golf Club, adjacent to Seoul's Incheon Airport, and as is typical of many courses in Korea, the course is lighted so that rounds can begin before sunrise and continue into the middle of the night. Two of the courses at Sky72 do well over 100,000 rounds per year, and that amount of traffic brings with it certain challenges.
There is of course the challenge of just getting the maintenance work done, but also the wear from all the traffic is severe. This is especially a challenge when zoysiagrass (Zoysia japonica) is used, as it so often is because of the climate, because there are less than six months of growth for zoysia in Korea.
At the beginning of spring, we can see in the photo above that the creeping bentgrass green has excellent grass coverage, but the zoysiagrass surround at the back of the green has been worn completely away through traffic during the winter. And the traffic makes for some unusual maintenance on bentgrass greens, where the hole location is changed multiple times per day. This is usually about every 80 to 100 players, or up to six times a day, I was told, at courses such as Korea Public GC, which hosts about 110,000 annual rounds and is open 24 hours a day from May to November.
Greens of course require relatively high rates of nitrogen when they receive so much traffic. I've written extensively about the growth potential and how it can be used to predict nitrogen requirements. Calculating the cool-season growth potential (GP) for Seoul and estimating a monthly nitrogen use of 3.5 g N/m2 when the GP is 1, we get an estimated annual use of 18.1 g N/m2. But the busy courses are using, generally, 30 to 40 g N/m2, to achieve the necessary growth rates to recover from traffic of more than 100,000 golfers each year.
During construction, it is customary to plant zoysia using stolons embedded in biodegradable nets that are rolled out across the fairways. After just visiting sod farms in the United States and finding that zoysia sod was selling for just over $3/m2, it was interesting to note that these zoysia rolls in Korea are the same price, and the installed price, including a layer of sand topdressing, is close to $5/m2. Once the rainy season and the hot weather of summer comes, this grass will fill in rapidly, and the fairway pictured above will be ready for a soft opening by October.
I saw cool technology too. At Golfzon County Sunwoon, I played 18 holes, the caddy kept our score on a tablet computer and recorded the number of putts for each hole, and she also took photos of our group on the course. When I returned to the clubhouse, I simply entered my locker number into a kiosk, and the scorecard was printed with a photo from our round, the hole by hole score, and the number of putts I had taken. It looks like I've got some room for improvement!
But that could be checked too, for there were two holes on which a video camera recorded my tee shot, archiving the swings on a website for my viewing at a later date as a record of the round, and immediately viewable on the in-cart tablet computer through the on course WiFi network. There is really some cool technology involved with these systems, and it is something that made my round of golf more fun than it otherwise might have been.
I recently visited the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) headquarters in Lawrence, Kansas. I've been a GCSAA member for 19 years, and to have the chance to visit the association office and meet with their staff about a range of topics, especially turfgrass education, was a highlight of my trip to the United States.
For GCSAA members in Asia, the live webcasts with the associated library of recorded, on-demand webcasts are an immediately useful resource, provided as a free member benefit through support from Syngenta. On topics ranging from algae management on putting greens to bunker sand selection to ultradwarf bermudagrass greens, these webcasts are a valuable learning resource.
Last week I visited three sod farms near Memphis with Dr. Jim Brosnan from the University of Tennessee, where I am an adjunct professor in the Department of Plant Sciences. We saw grass production on a different scale to what I am used to seeing on golf courses and sports fields. The mowers are a lot bigger, and so are the sod cutters and all the other equipment used to plant, maintain, and harvest these huge fields of turf.
The grasses grown on these farms were different varieties of bermudagrass (Cynodon), japanese lawngrass (Zoysia japonica), manilagrass (Zoysia matrella), and tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea).
I got to meet Bobby Winstead of Winstead Turf Farms, current president of Turfgrass Producers International (TPI). His farm is growing some of the popular new varieties such as Celebration and Discovery bermudagrasses and Palisades and Royal zoysiagrasses.
We also went to Battle Sod Farm in the Mississippi Delta and McCurdy Sod Farms in Dyer, Tennessee. We learned about irrigation and drainage of the huge sod fields, which are often watered by center pivot irrigation. We saw different types of verticutters and sprigging and plugging machines, all of which allow grass to be planted and grown and harvested at a scale I had never seen before.
Dr. Brosnan and I spoke at the monthly meeting of the Midsouth Turfgrass Council, where he introduced a new mobile weed manual and I explained how manilagrass sod is produced near Bangkok. In the United States, turfgrass production in general is very much mechanized, and the growth of manilagrass specifically is slow because of the temperate climate, with it taking more than a year to get a harvestable crop. At Thailand, the situation is almost completely reversed. Turfgrass production in general is almost entirely done manually, and manilagrass sod can be produced in five or six weeks, because it grows so well in the tropical climate.
I made this video a few years ago showing the techniques used in Thailand, and I will be putting together an updated version soon. Whether it is the large scale sod production in the United States or the small scale production in Thailand, it is fascinating to study about the techniques used to produce good turf.
Waterfall chart of potassium (K) on a golf course putting green shows why K is often required as fertilizer; the grass uses enough K in one year to drop the soil level below the MLSN guideline
A waterfall chart can be used to represent nutrient availability and use in turfgrass. This has been explained in case studies of a desirable element that is often added as fertilizer, potassium, and in the case of a less desirable element in turfgrass soils, sodium.
Potassium is often required as fertilizer because the grass uses more potassium than is available. The situation for calcium is quite different. The amount of calcium available in the soil is almost always much more than the grass requires.
This waterfall chart for calcium takes a look at the calcium in the soil and shows the various additions and subtractions of calcium over the course of a year.
Here is an explanation of these data.
A blue horizontal line is drawn at 360 ppm. That is the MLSN guideline for calcium, meaning we want to keep soil calcium at or above 360 ppm, and when we do that, we have a high level of confidence that turfgrass will be supplied with ample calcium.
The initial soil test level of 519 ppm is a typical level for sand rootzones. This is based on the median value of 100 soil samples taken from sand rootzones in five countries of Southeast Asia.
Annual plant uptake is expected to decrease the amount of calcium in the soil by 27 ppm. This is based on an estimated annual harvest of 900 grams dry matter per square meter, with an average leaf tissue calcium content of 0.45%. This is typical of bermudagrass turf with a twelve month growing season. Use of calcium by cool-season grasses in a temperate climate would be about half of the amount shown here.
No calcium is applied as fertilizer because it is not necessary. The amount in the soil is much higher than the MLSN guideline.
I estimate an addition of 80 ppm calcium to the soil through irrigation water. This is based on an average calcium concentration in the irrigation water of 20 ppm, and an annual irrigation amount of 600 L/m2. This is a conservative estimate of irrigation application at Bangkok based on 150 days of irrigation at 4 mm per day. Note that the amount added by the irrigation water in this conservative case is three times the amount of calcium actually used by the grass.
I estimate a leaching loss of 67 ppm. Normally calcium won't leach. But in this case it absolutely has to. Why? Because the soil cation exchange capacity (CEC) does not change. The exchange sites in the soil already have cations reversibly adsorbed to them at the time the irrigation water is applied. So some of the calcium added through irrigation must leach. There is no place for it to remain in the soil.
Taking the initial amount of 519 ppm in the soil, subtracting the amounts used by the grass and lost by leaching, and accounting for the amount of calcium added in the irrigation water, we are left with 505 ppm calcium in the soil after one year. This is still well above the MLSN guideline for calcium and this demonstrates why none is required as fertilizer.
For more information about calcium for turfgrass, see:
