Fusariummy

Aeration season is coming up and I just wanted to mention a few thoughts I have on the subject. I can't speak for everyone but it seems that it is common practice to apply a rather heavy nitrogen app just prior to aeration to speed the recovery. This makes sense as we are often forced to aerate when the temperatures and growth potential are not ideal for recovery but ideal to minimize the disruption to golfers. The pressure the golfers put on us to have perfect playing conditions immediately after aeration force us to do whatever it takes to get the greens back into shape. One of the things that I have talked a lot about on this blog is growth potential and nitrogen fertility and how growth rates are influenced more by temperature than by how much nitrogen we apply. Of course the amount of nitrogen applied has some impact on growth but if the temperatures aren't there it will do little. 4 days post aeration, no additional nitrogen applications made. 12mm holloww tine. For the p...

You probably aren't wondering what that crazy greenkeeper is up to in Pender Harbour but I'm going to tell you anyway! Overall disease pressure has been interesting. On areas that receive no treatment (fairways, tees) the disease was pretty bad. I have talked with a few other superintendents and most are all seeing the same thing: Crazy bad fusarium on fairways, especially on approaches. This is even apparent on approaches that had fungicide applications made in the fall. I have made no fungicide applications of any kind to my approaches. As the sun rises in the sky I have observed the grass start to out-compete the fusarium and recovery has begun! Bad fusarium. Possibly made worse by mower spread. Already recovering nicely. My fusarium management plan has evolved over the years and here is what I am trying right now. I am not using Civitas. I think I have seen damage due to phytotoxicity especially when it is frosty. I also  don't like the green colour . Any areas that wer...

Wow, What an honour! Social media in the turfgrass industry has exploded in the past few years and to be singled out among all of the amazing bloggers, tweeters, and facebookers is truly humbling. Thank you! I have been tweeting and blogging for almost 3 years now. I originally found comfort in social media as it allowed me to remain social for the 5 months a year that I work in isolation. I was able to interact daily with other turfheads just as if I had an assistant. At first I felt guilty for spending any amount of time at work using social media. This quickly wore off as the connections I made and information I learned started making big impacts in my operation. I can honestly say that the use of social media has saved my club 10's of thousands of dollars every year that I have been using it! We would probably be out of business if it wasn't for the things I learned. My philosophy for management in any operation is that there is no reason you shouldn't be tweeting and b...

Pesticide Sustainability. Do these two words even belong together? I don't know. What I do know is that pesticides are damn expensive and their safety and impact on the environment has been called into question. For these reasons I put a great deal of effort to reduce their use on the golf course. How do we measure the sustainability of pesticide use? It's complicated. I don't want to get into the costs of cultural control and all that jazz. That is a major focus of this blog after all. What if we look solely at the use of pesticides. How can we improve our current pesticide practices even with all of the crazy insane cultural practices we are already doing? Fusarium patch up close and personal For the longest time I used the cost and number of applications to gauge my success with pesticide use. Great, but do these things address sustainable pesticide use? Sure, cost is important but the number of applications has almost no impact on the environmental impact and safety of ...

A few years ago the turf industry in BC was facing a pesticide ban and our association set out to fight the ban successfully. At the time I was worried that we needed to also spend some resources in coming up with alternative pest control measures just in case the ban was enacted. I also wrote to the Western Canada Turfgrass Association with my concerns. Ever since then, alternative pest control strategies have been the focus of this blog. Last fall I was contacted to by the WCTA to see what I thought would be some things to try. They were already interested in phosphite and Civitas but I also suggested lightweight rolling as I had seen some interesting things on my study green with regards to fusarium. Just last month I was delighted to read that they had gone ahead with research funding at Oregon State University and had some preliminary results to share ! I was also honored to be mentioned in one of the articles. I won't repeat everything already in the above article so read ...

Last year I wrote a post about how my approaches has much more disease than the rest of my pesticide free areas of the course. I hypothesized that it could be due to the overlap of fertilizer applications. This year I was very careful to keep the fertility on my approaches lean and avoid overlap and this is what I got. I've seen worse Compared to a typical fairway There is an obvious difference in the amount of disease even though they are the same species mix of grass, same height of cut and receive the same fertilizer treatments. Tees, Fairways and Approaches are all completely pesticide free. At the time of writing that post a fellow Superintendent, Jason Hooper , suggested that it could be due to all the traffic the approaches got. At the time I didn't really think traffic had anything to do with it. The problem was is that I was thinking about traffic all wrong. I thought that the traffic would cause the disease by stressing the turf and making it more susceptible which ...

One of the most over-used words in the turf industry the past few years has been "sustainable." People throw it around (and I'm just as guilty) but don't really have much data to back it up. What is sustainable? On the golf course it means using the minimum required resources to produce the expected conditions. This fall I decided to take part in the Global Soil Survey  (GSS) to really get a good idea of how sustainable my fertilizer practices really were. I sent off my samples and received my comprehensive soil test results typical of PACE Turf . Here are my test results. And here is where the test results differ from your typical soils tests: As can be seen from the above tables, I don't currently have any nutrient deficiencies according to the Minimum Level for Sustainable Nutrition guidelines (MLSN) . I would also have to agree as my greens look pretty good. In Table 2 you basically get a report card of how you are doing. Table 3 tells you how much nutrients y...