Fusariummy

Most of our greens have slowly transitioned towards bentgrass dominated swards in the past few years In a recent post I discussed how the nutrient content of the soils was different depending on the depth and outlined some ideas of how we could use this to our advantage. We can keep poa super happy with more consistency (it's known to be temperamental and this is probably why) or we can use it to suppress poa while promoting other turf species like bentgrass or fescue. There are major differences in nutrient content at depth and it is useful to understand this but it is also cumbersome to test at various depths or tissue test every week like some might do. Instead, we can use our Supercharged fertilizer and clipvol records to help us understand how much nutrient we are removing from the turfgrass system and adjust our fertilizer applications to either under-fertilize or apply a sufficient amount of each nutrient to favor one turfgrass species over the other. We can estimate how mu...

I was made aware of Doug Soldat's annual tweet showing the difference of disease on bentgrass with and without potassium fertilizer on one of Micah Wood's latest blog posts . The difference is drastic and the picture still impresses years later. Micah and Doug also just did an hour long video on the subject. For that past few years I have struggled controlling the disease at my new course. Nothing we did would control the fusarium. I sent off samples to labs and tried every chemical control available. Nothing worked as good as I remembered it working at Pender. This year (knock on wood. I'm not superstitious just a little stitious) the disease has been virtually non-existent despite the various disease models being maxed out for m.nivale. Needless to say it has been very Fusariummy this winter ( you're supposed to drink every time I type it) but we have been able to manage the disease to very manageable levels. Levels that are less than ball marks and insect damage co...

A few posts back I talked about how I found it useful to compare a 30 day running average growth ratio to a 30 day running average nitrogen genki. This would tell me  how my grass was growing and how much nitrogen I had applied compared to the standard level which I have determined to be about 2/g nitrogen per square meter per month at a 100% growth potential. After thinking and using that tool for a few months now, I wondered about the other nutrients. Last year I had issues with the grass not growing as expected and it turned out to be a phosphorus deficiency probably made worse by regular phosphite applications. The growth ratio model showed that the grass was growing too slow and in reality it probably was as we suffered from issues caused by slow growing turf such as Anthracnose! The more experience I get with the growth ratio model, the more valuable it becomes as a tool to help me keep the growth rate where I want it and plant health issues to the minimum. Most issues I hav...