I almost always recommend keeping the soil pH above 5.5. This minimizes soluble aluminum in the soil, which can be toxic to roots. Get the soil pH above 5.5, and the soluble aluminum won’t be very soluble anymore—it drops almost to 0. This week I received test results from Brookside... [Read More]

The PPFD (photosynthetic photon flux density) every 5 minutes for a day, week, month, and year at Corvallis looks like this. I’m not so interested in the PPFD when the temperatures are too cold or too hot for photosynthesis. I selected only those times in 2014 when the C3 growth... [Read More]

Photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) provides the energy for plants to grow. Unlike temperature or precipitation data, which are readily available, it is less common to see the numbers or charts for PAR. This is PAR at Corvallis, Oregon, on a day with light cloud cover in June, on a sunny... [Read More]

I made a few small updates to the MLSN K calculator. This was the first Shiny app I made, back in 2014. You can see all of them—the Turf Twitter ones, the Hargreaves ET calculator, irrigation requirement demos, PACE Turf’s GP avatar generator, and more, at the ATC Shiny apps... [Read More]

Dr. Carrow gets right to the point in the very first sentence of his classic article about new technologies and ethical purchasing, writing that “staying on the cutting edge … requires integrating new products and technologies.” He explains that “expending large amounts of club funds for testing a new technology... [Read More]