In case you missed them, these articles and links from June are likely to be of interest to turfgrass managers in Asia:

To understand turfgrass nutrient requirements and how grass will respond to fertilizer, one must understand just what it is that controls nutrient demand. Kussow et al. explained this in Evidence, Regulation, and Consequences of Nitrogen-Driven Nutrient Demand by Turfgrass.

I wrote about temperature-based turfgrass growth potential and explained how one can use growth potential to derive an estimate of grass nitrogen use. Download the guide here: Using temperature to predict turfgrass growth potential (GP) and to estimate turfgrass nitrogen use.

Greg Evans, MG, on the Ealing Golf Course Aronomy Blog, wrote about the results seen after implementing the growth potential method. He explained in detail what has been done, and how it compared to last year. "Our conclusions so far are very positive. We have used less fertiliser ... but our performance was better."

At the US Open, Dr. John Kaminski captured this great image of USGA agronomist Darin Bevard with a stimpmeter in the rain.

PACE Turf put together this chart looking at rain amounts during the week of June 7 to 14 (US Open week) in Philadelphia for the past 20 years. Was the rain that fell in 2013 usual, or unusual? The chart makes the answer pretty clear.

In Philadelphia, cool-season grasses are typically used for golf courses. In Seoul, where the average temperatures through the year are almost identical to Philadelphia, the warm-season grass Zoysia japonica is in common use. Why? I suggest that even though the temperatures are similar, the shockingly different timing in rainfall between these two cities creates a difficult environment for cool-season grass in Seoul.

Keith McAuliffe wrote about how to get more play through better drainage in a new My View piece on The R&A's Golf Course Management page.

Don't Take Your Vitamins was the headline in the NY Times. Large quantities of supplemental vitamins can be quite harmful indeed. If there is already enough of something, ingesting more may cause more harm than good. Shouldn't we take the same care with turfgrass? The MLSN guidelines are a good place to start.

Dr. Rick Brandenburg created this funny (but important) video about snake oils and how to evaluate their effectiveness.

I wrote about making using of nutrients in the soil, showing through a graphical approach how the amount of available calcium and potassium in the soil is related to annual plant use and consequently to fertilizer requirement (or not).

The GCSAA announced a new webcast series for the upcoming months. I'll be teaching about Nutrient Use and Requirements on 24 October. You can register for the webcast here. 

I taught about irrigation management in summer at a seminar in Osaka. The handout from the seminar is available for download in English and in Japanese.

I wrote about summertime syringing to cool bentgrass greens, and why I would not do it today. This post (and the Twitter discussion that prompted it) drew a lot of attention, with some agreeing, and others vehemently opposed. What do you think?

Rather than attempting to cool grass through syringing, which I consider to be a spurious effort, I suggest maintaining the optimum level of plant-available water in the soil.

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