Fusariummy

We don’t have as much control as we think we do. — Sean Reehoorn (@spartangrass) October 17, 2018 It's totally true. This year I had big plans to control growth on my greens and boy did I fail. Despite having an intimate understanding of how fast each and every one of my greens was growing as well as how much fertilizer I had applied and how much growth I could expect from those applications, the growth rate this past May and August went completely off the rails. You'll also notice that the previous two years I was able to achieve relatively consistent growth, then it all fell apart. WTF! As you can see, the growth this past May and August was significantly higher than in previous years. This despite never applying less fertilizer to the greens. The total cost this year for those that are wondering came out to $275 for 1 acre of greens or about $0.07 per square meter. Dude! Like Sean says, "we don't have as much control as we think we do."  Although growth this su...

Step 1: Do not apply a preventative fungicide prior to verticutting greens despite there being a small amount of active fusarium present. Step 2: Verticut greens in 2 directions. Be sure to start on the always untreated collars to drag the innoculum onto the greens. Step 3: Do not spot spray any new infection sites for the next 2 weeks. Step 3: Irrigate with cool spring freshet water during an early season dry spell. Step 4: Continue to mow with dull "rockbuster" reels almost daily for 1 week to spread the disease even further. On Tuesday, April 22nd I put out the first broadcast traditional fungicide spray in almost 4 months! in that time I had used nothing but phosphite and careful spot spraying to keep the greens almost 100% clean of any disease. Spot spraying was going so good right up until it went bad! I expected spot spraying to eventually not work but for completely different reasons. I initially thought that the natural incidence of disease would be the factor that I...

This post is a bit late as I have been a tad busy the past few weeks moving to a new town and battling the July summer heat. June might go down as one of the most difficult months I have ever had dealing with disease and the survival of my putting greens. I had two of the worst outbreaks of Fusarium I have ever seen in my 6 years as Superintendent here. It was a stressful month to say the least but I came out of it with a few new strategies for next year. The massive failure that was June 2013 helped me fine tune my disease management strategy. June seems to be becoming a wet month in my part of the world. Last year it was consistently wet all month long. This year it started off with a few intense rain events then got decently nice for a week or so followed by an insane week of rain (same weather event that flooded Calgary). The first week of June my original disease management approach fell apart and I was forced to go back to traditional pesticides to regain control of the fusarium....

This morning while checking on my moss study plots I was treated to a pleasant surprise. The study putting green was caked in fusarium patch just the same as the rest of my putting surfaces. I always gravitate towards the plot that is rolled 8x a day just to see how it is managing. The turf was slightly thinning but there was absolutely no fusarium present! At first I was a bit surprised but then again it's no big deal to not see any disease on a small 4'x4' section of the putting green turf even with severe disease pressure. I kept on looking at all the plots to rate them on fusarium severity. I made a hasty observation that plots that were rolled at least 4x/day had no disease where plots with 2-3x/day had some disease and the control plots were severely infected. Wow! We know rolling has an effect on Dollar Spo t but Fusarium? Really? These observations are very early and clearly demand further investigation. This moss study is a long term pet project of mine so it shou...

Lately there has been a lot of talk about sustainability in golf and reducing our reliance on chemicals.  For the most part if we can reduce or manage the stresses that are affecting our turf we can manage the turf pests that have the potential to kill the turf. How often do we need to cut our greens in the winter? One of the most common stresses that we as turf managers force upon our putting greens is intensive mowing. Many superintendents mow their greens once or twice a day in the summertime to keep the putting greens consistent and smooth.  In the summer this is often sustainable as the turf is growing and usually quite healthy.  In the shoulder seasons as well as winter we often have to reduce our mowing frequency to match the changing growth rates of the turf.  We have to take special care not to cut the turf too often or not enough. Cutting too much causes extra stress and cutting not enough will increase the chance of scalping unless the heigh...