From June of 1932, when he arrived in Tokyo, until the war between the United States and the Empire of Japan began in December 1941, Joseph Grew served as the United States Ambassador to Japan. I read his Ten Years in Japan about this period, and to my surprise, I... [Read More]

The median blog post on this site in 2018 got 217 views. A couple had more than 1,500. These were the 10 that everyone read. And then there are these ones that almost no one read. These 10 posts all had less than 106 views at the end of the... [Read More]

With so many delegates to BTME—the BIGGA Turf Management Exhibition—using Twitter to communicate about the event, I thought it would be interesting to look at some statistics related to the #BTME2019 hashtag. I first saw this type of conference analysis done by Neil Saunders, and I have largely used his... [Read More]

One of the most interesting articles I read last year was Drought responses of above-ground and below-ground characteristics in warm-season turfgrass by Zhang et al. That article describes the drought response after 3 weeks with irrigation withheld: Despite a few rain events … , extensive drought stress developed in most... [Read More]

As I say at the end of every year, it was another extraordinary year for studying grass around the world. In 2018 I took 107 flights for a total distance of 314,748 km (195,575 miles). That’s an increase from 2017, when it was 78 flights and 205,043 km. Earlier this... [Read More]