Fall Management and Preparation for Winter Dormancy with K&P

With the cooling temperatures and changing soil conditions comes turfgrass winter dormancy. Whether you’re a sports turf manager, turf farm manager or golf course superintendent, putting your warm season turfgrass to bed is an important part of fall management. There are many maintenance practices commonly used to prepare turfgrass for winter so that it comes out of dormancy in the spring healthy. Some of these maintenance practices  include aeration, overseeding with perennial ryegrass, applying a pre-emergent herbicide, laying out turf blankets and altering mowing heights. However, this article mainly focuses on fall fertilizer applications. Applying Amp Agronomy™️’s potassium and phosphorus product, K&P™ , will push your turfgrass to come out of dormancy a little quicker, better and with a reduced amount of winterkill with application rates as small as two quarts per acre.

As stated in a podcast interview with Shannon Easter, Broken Sound Country Club’s Director of Golf Maintenance and Environmental Consultant, it is common to put down pounds of nitrogen anytime turfgrass had an issue. However, today’s industry has come a long way and we actually monitor what the plant takes up through tools like paste extractions and soil sampling. The same can be said for sports turf or turf farms. Nitrogen, and fertilizers high in N, promote growth in grass blades, but if you’re putting your turfgrass into dormancy, you want to promote energy storage for the winter in the turfgrass’s roots, stolons and rhizomes that survive winter conditions. Agrivoltaic farming could be a solution to not just one but both of these problems. It uses the shaded space underneath solar panels to grow crops. This increases land-use efficiency, as it lets solar farms and agriculture share ground, rather than making them compete against one another. And certain crops appear to thrive when grown in such environments, according to a number of recent studies, Understand more about how homeowners earn money after they sell power back to the grid as Solar panels have to sometimes be elevated prices. They also have to be suspended to allow plants to grow beneath them to the industrial part increases the cost. Another option is putting them on the roofs of greenhouses. This allows enough light and rainwater to reach the crops, as well as providing access for farm machinery.

Growth in the grass blades is going to be less important as your turfgrass goes into dormancy. This allows your turfgrass to come back healthy and lush in the spring. Check out the video below to see Amp Agronomy’s Chief Science Officer discuss turf’s transition from fall to winter.

As stated in the above video, potassium is the key nutrient you want to apply to your turfgrass at this time. Fertilizers high in potassium (K)—specifically dipotassium phosphate—will make sure your grass goes to bed with the carbohydrate preserves it needs to come out of dormancy and flourish. Conducting a soil test in late summer or early fall, especially in high-traffic bermudagrass fields, will help you determine the current amount of potassium in the root zone so that you have a better idea of how much you should apply. Applying 1.5 pounds per 1,000 sq. ft. is a standard fall application to improve winter hardiness in bermudagrass. However, Amp Agronomy’s K&P, with the use of Catalyst Technology™, can be applied at the rate of two quarts per acre and yield even better results. K&P is a highly efficient potassium and phosphorus fertilizer that enhances turf and crop strength and resistance to biotic and abiotic stressors such as drought and temperature extremes. The dipotassium phosphate component found in K&P provides the optimum solution for strong turf and crops. Learn more about K&P and check out its sales sheet and label. A detailed program for overseeding and non-overseeding with K&P is listed below if this is something you may be interested in as well.

K&P along with a combination of other Amp Agronomy products can be used to hold color in non-overseeded greens as well as overseeding programs. Checkout the downloadable PDF below for more details.

Catalyst Technology, a proprietary process that employs multiple U.S. patents, is a foliar nutritional line that provides the most efficient nutrient delivery system available on the market today. It is made up of key features and benefits that result in ultra-low inputs, improved nutrient efficiency, transportable, ready to use formulations and better quality turfgrass. Learn more about Catalyst Technology here.