SportsTurf

July 2016

SportsTurf provides current, practical and technical content on issues relevant to sports turf managers, including facilities managers. Most readers are athletic field managers from the professional level through parks and recreation, universities.

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34 SportsTurf | July 2016 www.sportsturfonline.com FIELD SCIENCE BY DAVID R. HUFF, PHD S eed serves as a remarkable means of plant propagation, particularly in terms of commercial application of plant material. It ships well, it stores well, and large-scale establishment can be achieved relatively quickly at low cost. In the turfgrass industry, it is most typical that cool-season species are propagated by seed, whereas warm-season turfgrass species are propagated vegetatively through either sprigs or sod. While there are exceptions to this general tendency (i.e., vegetatively propagated cool-season species and seeded warm-season species), for the most part, our industry uses seed to establish cool-season turfgrass species like bentgrass, perennial ryegrass, tall fescue, Kentucky bluegrass and fine fescues, while vegetative propagation is commonly used for warm- season species like bermudagrass, St. Augustine grass, zoysiagrass and seashore paspalum. Much has been written about using seed as a means of turfgrass propagation, including the basic importance of various aspects like purchasing, applying and establishing seed; for example, being able to properly understand and use the important information contained on a seed label like the calculation of the percent Pure Live Seed (PLS) for comparing the true costs of different seed products (example, see http://plantscience.psu.edu/research/centers/turf/extension/ factsheets/seed). However in this article, I would like to present some of the different, though no less important, aspects of using seed to establish areas of turf. For example, over the years, I have found that most turf managers view their seed as an individual cultivar or variety, in that all the seed in a bag, of say "Penncross" creeping bentgrass, is genetically all the same. The truth is that each individual seed gives rise to a genetically unique individual plant. By genetically unique, I mean that some plants will be big and others small, some will be dark green and others light green, some will tiller more while other stay less dense, etc. This is because each seed in the bag was the result of a fusion between a sperm from the pollen-donator parent plant and an egg from the seed-bearing parent plant. And just as in animals, insects and human beings, each individual is genetically unique and different from all others because each was derived from a unique combination of sperm and egg that gives rise to their genetic uniqueness. A NUMBERS GAME I often like to tell my students that there are more stars in the universe than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of planet Earth and that there are more genetically different individuals of Penncross creeping bentgrass than there are SEED: WHAT'S IN THE NUMBERS?

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