disease

On a recent trip to southern Europe, I was walking on a fairway and looking down at the grass. I’d seen some bermudagrass (Cynodon) fairways and did not notice any dollar spot.

Have you ever seen patches like this on Zoysia turf? Maybe the early stages of an intense large patch outbreak, or elephant’s footprint (Rhizoctonia cerealis) that got out of control? Way out of control?

This post was first published at the TurfDiseases page and I am reprinting it here. If you want to have a good sward, then you’ll need to make sure the grass is supplied with enough nutrients.

There’s an interesting article by Espevig et al. on Effects of rolling and N-fertilization on dollar spot and Microdochium patch on golf greens in Scandinavia. rolling a red fescue green two times a week reduced dollar spot by 61% compared to no rolling rolling four times a week reduced dollar spot by 95% increasing annual N on a creeping bentgrass + Poa annua green from 15 to 24 g/m2 reduced dollar spot by 24% but the following spring saw twice as much Microdochium patch on the plots which received the higher N rate There are a number of surface performance benefits that come from rolling, and disease suppression is one of them.

The recording of my presentation on “Managing turfgrass diseases in Asia with minimal input” is now online. Watch it here. I gave this presentation as part of the session on “Precision Turf and Ornamental Disease Management in the 21st Century” at the International Congress of Plant Pathology in July.

These are my slides for today’s presentation in the “Precision Turf and Ornamental Disease Management in the 21st Century” session at the International Congress of Plant Pathology in Boston. The abstract for my presentation is here.

Yesterday I saw some dollar spot on a korai (Zoysia matrella) fairway in Kyushu, Japan. I wondered what the Smith-Kerns model probability for dollar spot had been. So I looked up the recent temperature and humidity at a nearby weather station.

I’ve written about reactive greenkeeping being at least a viable option, and have implied that it is preferable to proactive greenkeeping. With a little effort, one can get information (data) about the weather, the amount of water in the soil, the quantity of nutrients in the soil and the quantity of nutrients used by the grass, the growth rate of the grass, and so on.

I was searching the Turfgrass Information File for ’turfgrass quality rating’ and a couple interesting silicon/silica/silicate projects appeared in the results. The first one, Fortification of Potassium Silicate With Compost Tea and Seaweed Extract for the Management of Dollar Spot of Turfgrass by Manoharan, I’ll summarize with this quote: “this study did not effectively control the dollar spot disease severity.

Who would have thought that adding potassium would increase disease? I enjoyed talking with Doug Soldat about this research when he presented “Potassium fertilization affects microdochium patch severity on creeping bentgrass” by Bier et al.