Fusariummy

Why the hell would you want to do that? You can search the internet for reasons to promote bentgrass grain and I assure you, you won't find much. This is no April Fools joke. In the world of promoting bentgrass over poa there are a ton of strategies that superintendents use. From managing moisture, to reduced fertilizer and pesticides, to practicing the disturbance theory and allowing the poa to die in winter, it seems that if you want to be successful with bentgrass management you need to do it all. Coarse, grainy bentgrass growing over top of, and shading out the poa. One of the tools that supers in the States can use that we can't use in Canada are the growth regulators that hurt poa but not bentgrass. So that approach simply isn't feasible for us up north. There are many differences between how poa and creeping bentgrass grow. Poa is upright, compact and very dense. Bentgrass grows laterally, has a thicker leaf blade, and although newer varieties are a lot more dense, t...

Easily my favorite tweet of the week was: @PenderSuper This was a couple years ago 2014 Greens were "rolled" by mistake with greens roller 3 days after seeding pic.twitter.com/q9zg7J5UcZ — Robert Lee (@SPRobertLee) March 22, 2017 And in typical Twitter fashion the idea snowballed to produce my second favorite tweet of the week: @PenderSuper @SPRobertLee Good seed to soil contact here from Bobcat tire. pic.twitter.com/cHAuj6v2Bp — GaryC (@GaryCinChicago) March 23, 2017 Obviously, this is common knowledge but to see such a clear example is pretty cool. You can even see the gap between the steering rollers on his Tru Turf Roller. Yes, you can even tell the brand of roller based on the establishment pattern. This is something that Dr, Thom Nikolai also found in his rolling research. Check out the following video about rolling for seed bed preparation. While it might seem like common sense to refrain from rolling during establishment, Thom has some advise that might surprise ...

It's no secret that I, and many others in the area, have suffered winter damage on our greens. Needless to say I have done a ton of research on strategies to recover from the damage as quickly as possible. Long story short, it almost always requires temperatures to warm up. There are, however, a few tricks that I have picked up this winter that I haven't read about much online so I thought I would pass them on with hopes that maybe they will help speed up the recovery of any winter damaged grass you might have. Last month while at a turfgrass conference in Victoria, B.C. I had some awesome discussions with other turfgrass professionals about their experience with winter damage recovery. The following 2 strategies are things that I picked up from others, and will be trying and sharing about this spring. Seed Priming There really isn't much info out there about this relatively old practice. It's kind of funny because when it was suggested that I prime my seed to speed ger...

I came across this on twitter this morning. Noticed this while out cutting some leaners this morning. Sand channel on left quad-tine core, channel on right solid-tine. #issolidbetter ? pic.twitter.com/OiGXBFjOZ5 — Rob Steger (@SaginawCCturf) February 23, 2017 And then this rely: @TheFortressTurf Tried solid tines for the first time last fall, incorporated 30% more sand into the profile than we usually do. 3/4" — Rob Steger (@SaginawCCturf) February 23, 2017 This got me thinking about what I have noticed on my course. For the past few years we haven't been pulling a core and I also noticed that we were able to get about 30% more sand into our greens at aeration time but never really though much of it as it relates to solid vs core aeration. I think that when we core, it is difficult to get the entire plug removed. This leaves some of the holes still partially filled with soil/sand and reduces the amount of sand we can get into the hole. Getting a good core is dependant on a ...

You might have heard that my course has suffered some winter kill and I'm sure some of you have some questions about why this happened relating to GP and the MLSN as well as how I plan on recovering from it using the GP and MLSN. So is my dead grass a result of the MLSN or GP? If I was the only course to have winter damage I might think so. Even so, I do talk about some pretty extreme practices that could lead to winter death of my grass. Is winter use of primo the reason my grass died? Probably not I have talked about how I limit potassium going into winter as inspired by this research. While this is interesting stuff and something that I am trying, Doug and others have made it clear that by limiting potassium during the fall can decrease the winter hardiness of poa annua. Poa annua is the predominant grass species on my putting greens so obviously it would be a bad idea to limit K during the fall as this would lead to bad things happening. Low K hasn't hurt the poa on th...

Ok, so this is going to be a long one, but if you struggle with dollar spot and want to maybe reduce its impact on your grass and budget I promise it will be worth your time. Last week while at the 2017 Golf Industry Show I was a presenter at a panel discussion called " Successful Low-input Turf Management: Is it practical ?" One of the things I discussed was how the growth potential formula got my nitrogen rates on track and helped reduce the impact that dollar spot had on my course. After this talk and my release of the slides on my blog (linked above) I had a few people reach out with their similar dollar spot success. Of course I asked to see their fertilizer records and by no surprise to me, during times of typical dollar spot disease pressure, they were applying their highest rates of nitrogen (among other things). During my presentation on the growth potential and the MLSN I urged participants to take their growth potential nitrogen use recommendations and compare it t...

Today I did a presentation on Job Boards on the trade show floor at GIS. While there are many good paid versions, the free home-made versions can offer a lot of features that even the paid versions can't. Even if you still feel like the paid versions are best, I hope this presentation will help you look for features that matter to your operation and result in increased productivity instead of a needlessly complicated solution to a simple problem. Here's a link to my job board so that you can make a copy and try it out for yourself. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gidneAVXM2QZEvrC3JNAhCErdAqUC5eCbxel1ixq_Rk/edit?usp=sharing For a list of all my job board related posts click this link. http://www.turfhacker.com/search/label/job%20board And check out my presentation below.