Fusariummy

And this is where everyone laughs at me. "No one uses EIQ you dummy," is what you're probably thinking. Well yeah, the too good to be true way to quantify pesticide toxicity is just that, too good to be true. It really is too bad because having an easy-to-use way to assign pesticides a toxicity was very convenient and promised to be a very powerful decision making tool. For those of you who are concerned about quantifying pesticide toxicity it is helpful to learn why the EIQ doesn't work and what, if anything, we can use to quantify our pesticide use going forward. Basically, the reason that that EIQ is flawed is that it relies way too heavily on application rate. The higher the application rate the higher the EIQ would be. The impact on rate was so high that a weed scientist, Andrew Kniss , assigned random values to the EIQ toxicity parameters  73,000,000 times and found that the random values "provided the same recommendation as the EIQ about 88% of the time....

"Summertime and the livin' is easy" We are now half-way through the summer and have still not required a broadcast traditional fungicide application on greens. To say it has been easy would be a lie. It has been a roller coaster of disease activity but for the most part I have been able to keep everything in check and the golfers here have been enjoying some of the best conditions in years. The weather this summer has been very diseasey. What I mean by this is lots of cool and wet followed by hot and humid. Last year it was hot and dry which made it relatively easy to manage disease. This year I have seen it all. Dollar spot, brown patch, fusarium, and even thatch collapse! Even crazier is that I have seen it all at the same time. Dollar spot, fusarium, and brown patch in one photo on tees. This is "diseasey" For the past 4 years I thought I had dollar spot beat. That was until this year when I started seeing dollar spot on my greens. It came on very slow and I ...

This is a very similar post to one I did 4 years ago but instead of theorizing about the benefits of Growth Potential I am speaking with some experience. The growth potential fertilizer model isn't something that has been studied in depth by science (what's taking them so long) but that doesn't make it wrong. For this reason there are some people that are still quite skeptical of using a model such as this to schedule nitrogen fertilizer applications. While I'm obviously no scientist, I do now have almost 4 seasons under my belt and can share some of my initial reasons for making the switch and some of the reasons I continue to use it as a base for my fertilizer applications. Way back when I used to schedule my fertilizer based on the typical cool season growth curve similar to the one in the diagram below. We've all seen this. Big growth jump in the spring, a slowdown in the summer and a big growth jump again in the fall. I would then apply most of my fertilizer d...