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:

  • ‘nuan noi’ manilagrass (Zoysia matrella)
  • ‘Tifway 419’ bermudagrass (Cynodon dactylon x C. transvaalensis)
  • ‘salam’ seashore paspalum (Paspalum vaginatum)

These are the slides and this is the abstract for the talk.

The manilagrass grew the most in this experiment, which we ran for 48 days. All the grasses were supplied with a weekly rate of 1 g N m-2, and K was added to supply half, the same, and twice the amount of N. This plot shows the relationship between tissue K content and the daily growth rate.

growth and tissue K 3 grasses

Although the treatments to the grasses were different N:K ratios, the larger differences were the amount of growth between the grasses themselves.

I understand that the presentation audio was recorded and I’ll share that when it is available.