Fusariummy

When you make a fertilizer application, do you calculate the rate using the size of the greens, or the size of the area the fertilizer was applied to (spray area)? Unless you have a super high tech GPS sprayer with individual nozzle control, you likely also fertilize some of your green surrounds, collars and approaches when you fertilize your greens. This isn't a bad thing and can actually have a bunch of benefits. I talked all about this in a recent post where I discuss precision and whether or not it is actually useful or not on a golf course . Let's pretend my greens are 1ha in size and I apply one 25 kg bag of urea to that area. The rate would be 1.15g N/m^2 (25,000g urea x 46% N/g urea / 10000 m^2/ha = 1.15). If we include the overspray the area we applied fertilizer to turns to 1.2 ha. This changes our application rate to 0.96g N/m^2 which is 17% less! 17% is a pretty big number especially when spread out over a year. I have seen some examples with turf software where you...

It has been almost 2 months since my last post and it's not because nothing has been happening. It was a really busy and good summer and I was trying some new things out to combat disease on the golf course. Since my last disease update the main disease of focus has been Dollar Spot. Last year I was successful in combating Dollar Spot on my greens but my fairways were wiped out. It was the worst I had ever seen actually. As always applying a fungicide to my fairways wasn't possible. You could see the devastation from space More disease than grass in 2012 I accounted this extreme disease to a few factors. In an attempt to drive down fertilizer use on my fairways I had got to 100% UMAXX slow release nitrogen source. This allowed me to put down a heavier granular rate that would last longer. In theory I could get by with just two applications per year and would half the amount of nitrogen on my fairways. With the tools I had at the time this seemed to be the most realistic way to...

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....

So it has been a while since my last post and it is not because nothing has been happening. It has been busy running a golf course with a 3 person crew including myself. Lately people have been asking me how my battle with disease has been going so I thought I would throw out an update to catch everyone up. I have continued on with my updated plan that I revised in February  Plans are always subject to change and my disease management plan has continued to evolve this spring. So far the plan has been a great success with no major disease outbreaks to speak of. My applications of Civitas and phosphites every 3 weeks combined with my GP fertility program have really produced amazing results. As of today the greens are full of disease quite uniformly but the severity of that disease is minimal. By minimal I mean that you can see it, but barely, and it's not getting worse. Here is a picture to show just how bad it is. If you look really hard you can see many disease infection cen...

Happy February! Still no synthetics here! If you would have asked me last September if it was possible to grow Poa annua putting greens without the use of synthetic pesticides over the winter I would have called you crazy. It is now almost March and I have 3 greens that have gone without synthetic pesticides since September and one green since June! The toughest part of the fusarium season has past but it is far from over! For the most part I feel that the overall disease pressure this fall and winter has been low. We had an extended dry period this fall and the winter wasn't that cold or wet. February has been very mild and the turf has really started to grow. A little R. cerealis showing up again Currently the only troublesome turf diseases thy are active are M. nivale and R. cerealis . Tees and fairways have a moderate amount of fusarium and the approaches have an extreme case! The greens have had almost no fusarium activity all winter but I did apply two fungicide treatment...

Got some time? This one might take a while! A very big part of any IPM program is turfgrass nutrition and arguably the biggest part of turfgrass nutrition is nitrogen. Since starting out in the turf industry I have always struggled with how much nitrogen I needed to apply to keep my turf healthy. What even is healthy turf? Is this turf healthy? For me healthy turf is a playing surface that requires the least amount of inputs and money to achieve the desired playing conditions. To achieve healthy turf I start with the basics and work towards the more complicated stuff. There's not much point in focusing on the details if you don't have the major things in check. Obviously the major things you need to grow healthy turf are air, water and sunlight. After these things comes soil fertility or turfgrass nutrition. I have always felt that nitrogen was the biggest part of turf nutrition but I had no real way of easily knowing what the turf required. The other required plant nutrients w...