Page 14 - GM spring 2024

Soil tests showing how lean our soils are.
I think the importance of trying new practices is overlooked under the pressure to consistently perform and not to fail. Trust yourself and your ability to perform and you can make great changes. It is nice to have flourishing aquatic habitats, massive toad hatches and other natural occurrences and being able to achieve this with naturally occurring materials is rewarding. For my next venture, I would love to try to• find a way to naturally control Take All Patch. Though this may be impossible, it is good to shoot high and know that there is no harm in trying.
DECAYING FISH HELPS THE GREENS
The latest experiment I have tried is spraying decaying fish on the greens. Yes, I knew this spray would smell horrible and I am a bit nutty BUT it worked incredibly well. When I was in Osoyoos, the farmers would let fish carcasses cook in the summer heat in 20L pails. The following year they would add the contents of these pails to their vegetable crops. Their crops always came out phenomenally, so I assumed the fish fertilizer played a key role. Seeing how this type of fertilizer helped the vegetables in Osoyoos, I decided I would try it on our greens.
Salmon carcasses that have rot in a 20L pail for a few years.
14 • CGSA • GreenMaster
It is important to note that we can get heavy rains that can last for months through the fall/winter/ spring and these rains strip our soils of nutrients. Our soil pH is also around 5.5 to 5.8. Our irrigation water deriving from rain and runoff is also so barren it strips the soils of nutrients so spring is a tough time to grow grass here. The course can be open for a long time before soil temperatures are conducive to microbial growth. This means that it is very difficult to grow grass well in the time between opening the course and when soil temperatures increase to a point of good microbial growth and strong grass growth.
With this in mind, last year we sprayed a 20L pail worth of screened decomposed fish on our greens. I do have to say, it is as disgusting as it sounds. Most importantly though, is to note that this spring after spraying the greens with the fish spray, our greens were in the best early season shape I have seen them since I began here in 2001. The instant growth and improvement was evident. If you have not guessed by now... Yes... I do have six pails of salmon carcasses in storage out back getting ready for more trials next spring.
The obvious next challenge in this trial is to incorporate something to help with the smell. I used a minty
additive, which helps, but is not good enough to allow spraying during play. Currently I can only spray this concoction before the course opens but hope to work on this.
CHALLENGE YOURSELF TO BE CREATIVE
I hope you try to use some of these ideas to help your course be more environmentally friendly. I also hope this article inspires you to try your own ideas that you have been thinking about but haven’t tried yet. Luckily, most ideas with financial benefits are also environmentally beneficial, for example lowering your fertilizer and chemical inputs should always be a goal financially and environmentally, so there is very little reason not to experiment and try to improve your professional influence and footprint.
This industry has so many smart and creative people working in it that I would love to see how far we could go if everyone tried and shared one experiment. We all have learned so much in the past and I hope we keep being curious, learning and improving our business of growing turfgrass environmentally. Please share your knowledge and experience at conferences, through articles and at meetings as this is why we do what we do and what makes our industry and associations so rewarding.GM