Beyond plant growth, seaweed feeds the microbial community that underpins a healthy green. Polysaccharides like laminarin and fucoidan stimulate beneficial soil microbes, improve aggregation, and enhance nutrient cycling.
Category: Natural Greenkeeping
Grass Root Defences: Leatherjacket control in Bowling Greens
Grasses employ a range of physical, chemical, and indirect defences to protect their roots from insect herbivores. Further research is needed to fully understand these mechanisms and to explore other potential defences, but meantime, we can take some of this knowledge and apply it now to our greenkeeping practices.
What is the The Soil Food Web?
Each individual grass plant releases sugars through its roots to attract beneficial microbes. In return, those microbes mine nutrients from the soil, cycle organic matter, suppress disease, and improve soil structure. This is so important to the health of plants that they give up around 50% of the sugar they produce during photosynthesis as root exudates.
Mycorrhizal fungi and turf health, better bowling greens rely on us understanding this.
Mycorrhizal fungi and turf health go hand in hand. The symbiotic relationships that exist between our turf grass plants and soil fungi are critical to producing a high performance, perennial grass dominated sward. Here we look at the benefits of mycorrhizal relationships in turf and the techniques greenkeepers can employ to encourage them.
Grass, greenkeepers and the soil food web
The soil food web has become an increasingly popular term in greenkeeping and bowling green management. The problem-solution-problem, or symptoms approach to greenkeeping has been exposed as fundamentally flawed by the diminishing list of available pesticides now available to turf managers. Is there a better way to manage greens...yes. And the extraordinary discovery is that a greenkeeping program that focusses on the green as an eco-system is fully compatible with producing tight, natural turf dominated by the fine perennial Fescue and Bent grasses.