Fusariummy

Ok, so this is going to be a long one, but if you struggle with dollar spot and want to maybe reduce its impact on your grass and budget I promise it will be worth your time. Last week while at the 2017 Golf Industry Show I was a presenter at a panel discussion called " Successful Low-input Turf Management: Is it practical ?" One of the things I discussed was how the growth potential formula got my nitrogen rates on track and helped reduce the impact that dollar spot had on my course. After this talk and my release of the slides on my blog (linked above) I had a few people reach out with their similar dollar spot success. Of course I asked to see their fertilizer records and by no surprise to me, during times of typical dollar spot disease pressure, they were applying their highest rates of nitrogen (among other things). During my presentation on the growth potential and the MLSN I urged participants to take their growth potential nitrogen use recommendations and compare it t...

On the West Coast of Canada we are now well into the time of year where fusarium is the dominant disease on turf. Reflecting on the summer of 2016 I can't help but feel somewhat defeated by turf disease. I required a traditional fungicide for dollar spot for the first time in 4 years on my greens. While this has left me feeling down about my disease management plan this year a closer reflection shows that while I lost the battle to dollar spot, I won the battle with every other turf disease on my course this summer. Looking back at the data, the battles I have had in previous years, what other courses in my area were dealing with I can feel really good about my disease management this past year. To recap the requirement of traditional fungicide on my course this year so far is rather easy. The last fungicide application of the winter was on Feb 22. From that time I was able to keep disease levels at acceptable levels until Sept 4 when I needed to take action against dollar spot. Th...

Clear pattern of disease on approaches Jan 5 2015 My approaches have always been hammered by fusarium during the cool, wet winter months. Last year I hypothesized that most of the damage caused by fusarium was a result of the mowers spreading the disease around and that we might be able to reduce this damage by using Primo in the winter. This winter I decided to try out iron and primo to try and reduce the severity of the fusarium on my approaches. As you can see from the above picture taken on Jan 5 2015, the plan appears to be workin. No other products have been applied to the approaches and traditional pesticides are never applied to the approaches except for minimal overlap from the greens applications. Recent research has shown that at putting green height a rate of 97.65kg iron sulfate/ ha every 2 weeks provided almost complete control of fusarium during the winter. Because my approaches are cut at a much higher HOC I halved this rate for my approaches and have stretched the int...