Water Made Easy
BY JIM MILLER
Use this chart [see link to full article PDF below] to help you better understand how soil issues can arise when irrigation water quality deteriorates. There are so many products available to the turf manager today, but are they really necessary? By knowing your Sodium Absorption Ratio (SAR) and your Electrical Conductivity (EC), you can use the chart to determine what you should be doing based on the potential for problems in the soil.
Many times I see a facility invest a lot of money in equipment or product that they may not necessarily need. Florida’s overall weather patterns are quite easy to predict! (I may be the first to actually believe this.) By this I mean that Florida has a very predictable dry season and an equally predictable wet season. The dry season calls for every turf manager to be ready to amend soils properly to offset potential salt problems in the soil. The wet season usually does not provide enough flushing rainfall to adequately exchange the sodium built up on the soil colloid if those soils haven’t been amended properly during the dry season.