As a part of continuing efforts to extend the reach and coverage of TGIF back into the past, older turfgrass bulletins issued throughout the USA at the state level are increasingly showing up in TGIF. The effort, funded through 2008 by the Toro Foundation, will ultimately mean that TGIF indexes both current and past turfgrass publications as exhaustively as possible.
These bulletins, issued either by the Agricultural Experiment Station (AES) or the Cooperative
Extension Service (CES) within each state, and concurrently with the federal United States
Department of Agriculture (USDA), covered the range of both popular and professional turf culture. Most CES materials recommended best management practices for lawn and sports turf care on a localized basis, while the AES bulletins generally reported original research results or reviewed the current knowledge on a pest, weed, disease, species, or cultural practice. They were issued over a 100+ year period, generally within series of various titles, including ‘circulars’, ‘bulletins’, ‘special publications’, ‘leafl ets’, “factsheets’, etc. Most have now migrated to digital formats.
A sample list of such items within TGIF, published between 1903-1960, is available. They are sorted by year of publication, with the oldest items at the end of the list.
Having been widely distributed at the time of their release, these items are small and easily lost over time. Few have been digitized, but a number of states have programs underway to make these historic materials available online, and we will link to those when and as we become aware of those efforts.