Summer is upon us – November 2014

Well as alot of you do as I do we constantly look at the weather to see what possible turf growing conditions we are facing. At the moment we are looking for some rain (well majority of us are but  the golf tournaments are starting and the less variables the better).

I did a post on preparing for the heat last season and i thought it may be a good one to revisit just as a refresher with a few updates. If you at the past post the weather maps are quite similar for the long term forecast. (see 2013 post here).

 

• Start with a strong foundation early.Don’t skimp.
• Review what you did last year and change what did not work.
• Increase root health -Use root stimulants such as kelp, amino, humic fulvic acid products
• Look at your irrigation practices- This will be harder as the summer goes on especially when your cool season grasses are stressing out with a shorter root system. Keep the soil moisture consistent as not to stress our turf. There is no right or wrong method here but the aim is to get desired turf conditions (as Dr. Micah Woods says). (This is where soil mositure metres come in very handy- more on that in a future post). For an expalnation on water irrigation management have a look at the picture below from Micah Woods at the Asian Turfgrass Centre For more information on this work below see this link to his blog post.

 

 

 

 

• With warm season grasses protect your turf early on as the root system is still not fully active.
• Do a preventative fungicide and insecticide program. (if anyone would like a program designed for them please contact me). Under stress conditions some systemic fungicides may take longer to be taken up as the plant will not be fully functioning properly so be wary of this and apply fungicides on a prevention basis.
• Have a wetting agent program and start earlier rather than later
• When hand watering use wetting agent tablets to help cure and prevent localised dry spots
• Increase your height of cut. This will go a long way to help manager all types of stress with minimum disruption to greens speeds.
• Communicate with your stakeholders the stresses the turf is going under to give them an understanding of the situation and to better support you in the long run.

 

I have a few product profiles coming as well but in the meantime I have been getting asked why Dacogreen WeatherShield is different to other chlorothalonil products. It lies in the active ingredient and the formulation. Dacogreen remember used be Daconil until about 10 years ago, we just had a name change.

See my post from last year here

 

Cheers

Nadeem