Controlling disease on tees and approaches without pesticides

This past winter I was inspired by research out of Oregon State University by Clint Mattox on alternate control methods for the control of Microdochium nivale. I wasn't ready to take the plunge on greens but thought that I could adapt their findings to my tees and approaches. They used iron sulfate and sulfur to get reasonably good control of the disease over the winter on poa putting greens. I wrote about my early success with this plan earlier this past winter.

My tees are predominately ryegrass and bentgrass with a tough of poa. My approaches and green surrounds are mostly poa but have some bentgrass as well.

A great deal of the disease control success can be attributed to the incredibly mild winter we have had. Despite the nice weather there were times of high disease pressure on the course. Early January we were socked in with fog and the disease exploded. The recent warm and wet weather has also set the disease going on the putting greens and approaches.

Here is my application record. Nitrogen applications are based on growth potential for bentgrass.

kg applied

I also applied Primo Maxx monthly throughout the winter in an effort to reduce the spread of the disease by mowers. We cut tees 7 times from October until today despite the warm weather.

The cost of iron sulfate for the winter was about $55. I don't know of many traditional pesticide applications on 3000m2 that are that cheap!

Now the use of iron sulfate is solely for disease control. Because of this I feel it is important to calculate the EIQ of this practice. In the past I applied nothing for disease suppression so my EIQ was 0. This year the EIQ from the sulfur in the iron sulfate is 629! The EIQ from the use of ammonium sulfate is 1188! WOW! That is a total EIQ of 1817! To put that into perspective the total EIQ on my putting greens excluding sulfur contained in fertilizer is about 1000.

This brings up the

Disease control on approaches.

question of what the actual impacts of these alternative control measures are? Just because they aren't pesticides doesn't mean that they are safe, or less harmful for the environment. Either way I am torn. Do I continue to use "fertilizer" for disease control throughout the winter? Do nothing as I always have and suffer the less than perfect conditions? Or start using expensive traditional pesticides? If it comes down to perception, the do nothing is best, followed by the fertilizer method.

Thankfully I have all summer to ponder because, damn, the tees were sweet this winter.......

Turfgrass speedo is still my most important tool for managing turf growth after 4 years.

It wasn't the easiest year for growing grass , but the conditions were still pretty good. Almost 4 years ago exactly, I came up with the idea of comparing actual clipping yields to the "ideal" clipping yield or the clipping yield adjusted using the Growth Potential Model . Since then, it has proved to be a much more useful tool to manage growth than I originally thought . It has been almost a decade since I started making observations on plant health and playability and how it relates to the clipping yield. I have been constantly searching for ways to get the growth rate right as often as I can and this tool seems to be the best way I have seen so far, and might ultimately, be the best way going forward. To prove this point I will discuss in a future post, the success I've had with pest control in the past few years (for the most part (Not withstanding the times where I think my greens are dead but they actually aren't...thanks T)). Never needed less There are

Do you have enough?

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In a recent post, I discussed how it was actually cheaper to spray soluble vs granular fertilizer. What about if we use pre-mixed liquid fertilizer? How do we even figure out how much nutrient we are applying with pre-mixed liquid fertilizer? Before I learned that you could simply dissolve soluble fertilizer in water and apply it in a sprayer, I was a big user of pre-mixed liquid fertilizers. One of the issues I initially had was figuring out exactly how much of each nutrient I was applying. The math wasn't as straightforward is it was with granular fertilizers. It turns out, it's actually not that difficult but requires an extra step. First, we need to convert the liquid volume into a mass. Many products will have the product density displayed on the label or you can look in the Safety Data Sheet (SDS) for that information as well. No SDS? Should you be using products without an SDS? Even if this information isn't included on the label it is very easy to figure out. All

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