Fusariummy

A few years ago the turf industry in BC was facing a pesticide ban and our association set out to fight the ban successfully. At the time I was worried that we needed to also spend some resources in coming up with alternative pest control measures just in case the ban was enacted. I also wrote to the Western Canada Turfgrass Association with my concerns. Ever since then, alternative pest control strategies have been the focus of this blog. Last fall I was contacted to by the WCTA to see what I thought would be some things to try. They were already interested in phosphite and Civitas but I also suggested lightweight rolling as I had seen some interesting things on my study green with regards to fusarium. Just last month I was delighted to read that they had gone ahead with research funding at Oregon State University and had some preliminary results to share ! I was also honored to be mentioned in one of the articles. I won't repeat everything already in the above article so read ...

Last year I wrote a post about how my approaches has much more disease than the rest of my pesticide free areas of the course. I hypothesized that it could be due to the overlap of fertilizer applications. This year I was very careful to keep the fertility on my approaches lean and avoid overlap and this is what I got. I've seen worse Compared to a typical fairway There is an obvious difference in the amount of disease even though they are the same species mix of grass, same height of cut and receive the same fertilizer treatments. Tees, Fairways and Approaches are all completely pesticide free. At the time of writing that post a fellow Superintendent, Jason Hooper , suggested that it could be due to all the traffic the approaches got. At the time I didn't really think traffic had anything to do with it. The problem was is that I was thinking about traffic all wrong. I thought that the traffic would cause the disease by stressing the turf and making it more susceptible which ...

One of the most over-used words in the turf industry the past few years has been "sustainable." People throw it around (and I'm just as guilty) but don't really have much data to back it up. What is sustainable? On the golf course it means using the minimum required resources to produce the expected conditions. This fall I decided to take part in the Global Soil Survey  (GSS) to really get a good idea of how sustainable my fertilizer practices really were. I sent off my samples and received my comprehensive soil test results typical of PACE Turf . Here are my test results. And here is where the test results differ from your typical soils tests: As can be seen from the above tables, I don't currently have any nutrient deficiencies according to the Minimum Level for Sustainable Nutrition guidelines (MLSN) . I would also have to agree as my greens look pretty good. In Table 2 you basically get a report card of how you are doing. Table 3 tells you how much nutrients y...