By any other name, grass - spinach, cabbage, grunkel, graminoid - is still grass.
But do you appreciate grasses for the extremely diverse and versatile organisms that they are? After all, we don't just use grasses for sports turf, we make beer, whisky, paper, clothing, flooring and insulation from them. Bamboo and cereals are actually closely related to the sports turf you'll be playing on this weekend.
I sat down the other day with NMSU Associate Professor Dr. Ryan Goss at his Skeen Hall office to see what's been happening in turfgrass research.
While there is no official designation, Dr. Goss and his colleague Dr. Bernd Leinauer carry the NMSU load when it comes to the golf course maintenance industry. The two are known to many former students and their colleagues across the country as the NMSU "Turfgrass Department."
Both devote half their time to research, while Dr. Goss teaches and Leinauer does extension work for the other half of their positions. Dr. Leinauer's work takes him to golf courses, playfields, parks and even private homes across the State. As one might expect, both Goss and Leinauer's research focus is on water use, or rather finding ways to reduce it.
Dr. Goss has been testing and tinkering with various non-pesticide management (often called cultural) practices to minimize water use. The use of wetting agents, plant growth regulators and maintaining optimal fertility levels are ways to reduce water requirements of various turfgrass types.
Read more here
August 1, 2011
The House is poised to increase the “death ceiling” even as the debt ceiling debate stalls
As sustainability is more and more in the forefront of everyone's thoughts I thought this was an interesting read.
As yet another sign of how far the Congress is taking the country off track, keep an eye on how Congress fills the time while the debt ceiling debate stalls. To fill the time, the House of Representatives is busy adopting riders on the Interior Appropriations bill. Many of these riders explicitly defund or deauthorize the government’s ability to protect the public from dangerous pollution. The irony of all this has been recognized memorably by Rep. Ed Markey, who notes that “while the DEBT ceiling remains frozen, the DEATH ceiling is being raised” by these anti-environment appropriations riders.
These riders are legislative provisions that are far too extreme to pass Congress on their own merits, but not too extreme to offer during this legislative wilding in the House. Together, these riders undermine decades of progress protecting our nation’s environmental heritage. They threaten the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Read the rest of the article here.
As yet another sign of how far the Congress is taking the country off track, keep an eye on how Congress fills the time while the debt ceiling debate stalls. To fill the time, the House of Representatives is busy adopting riders on the Interior Appropriations bill. Many of these riders explicitly defund or deauthorize the government’s ability to protect the public from dangerous pollution. The irony of all this has been recognized memorably by Rep. Ed Markey, who notes that “while the DEBT ceiling remains frozen, the DEATH ceiling is being raised” by these anti-environment appropriations riders.
These riders are legislative provisions that are far too extreme to pass Congress on their own merits, but not too extreme to offer during this legislative wilding in the House. Together, these riders undermine decades of progress protecting our nation’s environmental heritage. They threaten the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Read the rest of the article here.
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