I was in Fukuoka last weekend and enjoyed the mid-winter weather and the seasonal colors of the turf. This is what golf courses in Japan look like in the winter. The par 4 fifth hole at Keya GC in Fukuoka on a February afternoon. Most golf courses in Japan have... [Read More]

The summary so far is this: standard recommendations for turfgrass sampling are to take 12 or more cores from each area and composite them into one sample I’ve been taking 5 cores and compositing them Donohue’s research in Virginia led him to recommend taking 20 subsamples and compositing them The... [Read More]

Now this series gets interesting. I’ve reviewed what I do, what a Twitter survey says people are doing, what Rutgers and Penn State recommend, and what an intensively sampled lawn in Virginia suggests would be an appropriate number of subsamples to combine in composite samples for turfgrass. The article Guiding... [Read More]

I’d read the soil sampling instructions from Penn State and Rutgers, suggesting a minimum of 12 subsamples be combined as a composite sample for each area. When I give instructions for sampling, I suggest a minimum of 5 subsamples be collected per green (or per area). And the Donohue article... [Read More]

I’ve recommended taking at least 5 subsamples per green, for as long as I can remember. That’s less than the 12 to 15 recommended by Rutgers, less than the 12 or more in the Penn State instructions, and way less than the 20 subsamples per composite recommended by Donohue. Spreading... [Read More]