Fusariummy

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...

Well it has been almost two weeks since my last post about yellow patch . Initially I was panicking due to the many unknowns that I was facing. I had never seen yellow patch ( R. cerealis ) damage turfgrass. Shortly after publishing that blog post I was inundated with information about the disease from other superintendents. Apparently I'm not the only one out there having difficulty with this disease on my greens!  7th green Yellow Patch Nov 24 7th green Yellow Patch Dec 06, same location as above picture. A fellow superintendent suggested to me that I try a nitrogen application. I immediately went out and sprayed an application of Ammonium sulfate at 0.05kg N/100m2 or about 9kg for all my putting greens or about $8 worth of product. This was basically the accumulated nitrogen needs for the turf for the winter months according the the growth potential calculations for my climate. If this proves to be a practical and effective means of control for this disease that would...

This summer I set out a disease management plan aimed at controlling Fusarium Patch with as little traditional pesticides as possible. So far this plan has been very successful at controlling M. nivale but in the past 2 weeks I have been caught off guard by another disease, R. cerealis or yellow patch or cool season brown patch or, or or or etc. This is typically the worst that I have seen yellow patch in previous years. Historically R. cerealis or yellow patch has never been a disease of concern for me. Last year I wrote a post outlining how I have never had to do anything for this disease on my greens ever. Since writing that post I have learned a lot about disease management. While the message remains the same my experience has changed quite a lot. When I wrote that post I was still regularly using traditional pesticides as needed on my putting greens. I was using a lot less than in previous years but I was nowhere near the lack of pesticide use that I am at today. Sinc...

The leaves are on the ground now so I guess it's safe to say fall has finally arrived. We saw a very extended summer that lasted well into October. The extreme dry conditions we faced in September were very interesting to say the least. I learned a great deal about both Fusarium and Dollar Spot and the conditions that favour these fungal organisms. Early September saw the overnight temperatures finally start to drop down to reasonable levels. My original Fall disease management plan was put in jeopardy in early September due to a sprayer breakdown. I'm not sure if it was a coincidence or what but about a week after stopping my disease management program Fusarium started to show up on a few of my greens. It was in the usual spots at first but quickly spread out on all but 5 of our 12 greens. The greens where it wasn't located were the greens that received the most sun which wasn't surprising. The first signs of the fusarium showed up on the 5th of Septe...