Fusariummy

                                               I noticed something interesting happening to the moss on my practice green this summer. It appeared to be under attach by some sort of pathogen. I posted some pictures online when I first made the observation and had literally no feedback as to what it could be. Maybe no one had seen this on their course because they didn't have this much moss? The first time I head of the possibility of this disease was from the Superintendent at my neighbour course. He had a very slight case of this but it really wasn't that obvious and I shrugged it off as nothing. I was really surprised to see such a widespread incidence on my practice green this spring. Today I came across a blog post from Dan Strey from Iowa State University who had made a similar observation in one of his moss studies. He found it to be  Sclerotium rolfsii and likened its appearance to that of the dollar spot fungus. He noted that "  It is very common in the tropics, s

This post is a bit late as I have been a tad busy the past few weeks moving to a new town and battling the July summer heat. June might go down as one of the most difficult months I have ever had dealing with disease and the survival of my putting greens. I had two of the worst outbreaks of Fusarium I have ever seen in my 6 years as Superintendent here. It was a stressful month to say the least but I came out of it with a few new strategies for next year. The massive failure that was June 2013 helped me fine tune my disease management strategy. June seems to be becoming a wet month in my part of the world. Last year it was consistently wet all month long. This year it started off with a few intense rain events then got decently nice for a week or so followed by an insane week of rain (same weather event that flooded Calgary). The first week of June my original disease management approach fell apart and I was forced to go back to traditional pesticides to regain control of the fusarium.