Viridescent - the Asian Turfgrass Center blog

Turfgrass Notes From Korea

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. 

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Turfgrass Nutrient Requirements and Fertilizer Choice

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How Much Potassium Does Grass Require?

Turfgrass Management on a Different Scale

Why is there cool-season grass in Philadelphia and warm-season grass in Seoul?

We can look at temperature data for Seoul and Philadelphia and we find that the average temperatures throughout the year have almost complete overlap. So we might expect that with such similar temperatures on a month by month basis, the grasses used in those cities would be similar. But while the courses at Philadelphia are mostly cool-season grasses, what we find at Seoul are primarily courses planted to Zoysia japonica. Here is a dormant zoysia fairway near Seoul in early spring.

Why such a different choice of grass when the temperatures are the same? I suggest that it has to do with summer precipitation. 

From June through September, Seoul has a higher monthly average rainfall than does Philadelphia, and during the two hottest months of the year, July and August, Seoul has more than three times the rainfall, on average, than does Philadelphia. This combination of high temperature with high precipitation can be deadly for cool season grasses.

Customize the chart yourself to see data for other cities.

Data: korea • Chart ID: ATC_climate_chart_Korea

R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30) • googleVis-0.2.16
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Webcast from the Australian Turfgrass Conference: Micah Woods on grass selection in Asia

The Australian Golf Course Superintendents' Association provide a great service by making so many of the presentations from their annual conference available for online viewing. 

At the 27^th Australian Turfgrass Conference in Adelaide, I gave presentations about turfgrass nutrient requirements, about grass selection, and about managing turf in microclimates.

In this presentation about grass selection, I spoke primarily about manilagrass (Zoysia matrella), bermudagrass or green couch (Cynodon), and seashore paspalum (Paspalum vaginatum). You'll see in this video representative photos of the different grasses and will learn how manilagrass persists and provides a fine turf even with minimal maintenance. In Southeast Asia, seashore paspalum tends to be overtaken by bermudagrass, you will see, and bermudagrass tends to be overtaken by manilagrass. This short video makes a case for using more manilagrass and less bermudagrass and seashore paspalum.

Korea, Winter Golf, and 45 New Courses in 2012

I visited Korea for a few days last week and am excited to write about it. Why? It was my first visit to Korea, and it is not often that I have a chance to write about my first impressions of a place. I visited five golf clubs around Seoul, comprising 126 holes (seven 18-hole equivalents), gave a seminar about bentgrass management during summer, and met with turfgrass researchers, golf course architects, and golf course superintendents. 

It was colder than I had expected, but not cold enough that golf courses close for a substantial part of the winter. It was cold enough that creeping bentgrass greens, even ones that are covered each night, were still effectively dormant during the 3^rd week of March. I did not realize how cold it gets in Seoul. The average temperature during December, January, and February is below 0°C, and in March the average temperature is only 4.5°C. 

What grasses are used? Greens are creeping bentgrass. Fairways and roughs are predominantly planted to Zoysia japonica, although a smaller percentage of courses have kentucky bluegrass fairways, and perhaps some tall fescue in the rough. Tees are kentucky bluegrass or Zoysia japonica.

Traffic on the dormant grasses or slowly-growing grasses is a major issue, and the courses I visited were taking special precautions to protect the high-traffic areas as much as possible.

And the courses were busy! At the 27-hole facility where I gave the seminar, there were 400 rounds the day I visited. Golf courses in Korea have been busy, with average rounds a decade ago of about 90,000 per 18 holes per year. With so many courses being built, those round numbers are going down, and are now expected to be about 65,000 per 18 holes per year. I saw a newspaper clipping listing the 36 clubs that are scheduled to open this year, with a total of 810 holes, or 45 18-hole equivalents. 

I visited the Samsung Everland Turfgrass & Environment Research Institute, listened to a presentation from the scientists there about the work that they do, spoke a bit about some of the work I have been doing recently, and visited a golf course with their team to assess the turf and soil conditions.

Korea is a difficult place to produce good turf conditions because of the cold winters with heavy traffic on dormant grasses, then hot summers with low light and high humidity. I was impressed with the grass conditions I saw, considering these significant challenges, and I look forward to my next visit when I can learn more about the techniques greenkeepers in Korea are using to produce such fine playing surfaces.