Fusariummy

"Summertime and the livin' is easy" We are now half-way through the summer and have still not required a broadcast traditional fungicide application on greens. To say it has been easy would be a lie. It has been a roller coaster of disease activity but for the most part I have been able to keep everything in check and the golfers here have been enjoying some of the best conditions in years. The weather this summer has been very diseasey. What I mean by this is lots of cool and wet followed by hot and humid. Last year it was hot and dry which made it relatively easy to manage disease. This year I have seen it all. Dollar spot, brown patch, fusarium, and even thatch collapse! Even crazier is that I have seen it all at the same time. Dollar spot, fusarium, and brown patch in one photo on tees. This is "diseasey" For the past 4 years I thought I had dollar spot beat. That was until this year when I started seeing dollar spot on my greens. It came on very slow and I ...

This is a very similar post to one I did 4 years ago but instead of theorizing about the benefits of Growth Potential I am speaking with some experience. The growth potential fertilizer model isn't something that has been studied in depth by science (what's taking them so long) but that doesn't make it wrong. For this reason there are some people that are still quite skeptical of using a model such as this to schedule nitrogen fertilizer applications. While I'm obviously no scientist, I do now have almost 4 seasons under my belt and can share some of my initial reasons for making the switch and some of the reasons I continue to use it as a base for my fertilizer applications. Way back when I used to schedule my fertilizer based on the typical cool season growth curve similar to the one in the diagram below. We've all seen this. Big growth jump in the spring, a slowdown in the summer and a big growth jump again in the fall. I would then apply most of my fertilizer d...

I have been putting this post off for a while now. It seems that whenever I post about my success with disease management on my course I immediately get bit in the ass. Karma or something.. Who cares about the crooked flag when the greens are disease free? So for this reason I am hesitant to write this post sharing my experience over the past 4 months battling turf disease on my course. Here's the problem, there isn't any . Maybe if I type it really small it won't be heard by mother nature and she will spare me in the coming months. Here's the thing, since my last traditional pesticide application on Feb 22nd, there has been almost no disease on my greens. I'm the most surprised person really because never in my entire career have I seen something even close to this. Every day I venture out to inspect my greens I am expecting chaos, total destruction, disease apocalypse, but to my disbelief the greens continue to be more or less disease free. Aside from a few minor...