Awesome graphs and cool season grasses!
This trip included one of the best discussion and presentations about Dr. Woods' climate maps and also put me back in touch with cool season turfgrasses. A major issue I saw in Beijing was the desire to start using Kentucky bluegrass throughout the fairways. ...
11
May
2012
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Hong Kong Clouds and Beijing Botanizing
The seminar was at Clearwater Bay, a course with manilagrass tees, fairways, and roughs. We saw a little bit of dollar spot and heard from superintendent Darry Koster about his preventative fungicide program for large patch (caused by Rhizoctonia solani). It gets just cold enough at Hong Kong for large...
08
May
2012
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Two-Wheeled Vehicles and Zoysia Putting Greens
We headed to Twin Doves Golf Club where I had my opportunity to see a wall-to-wall Seashore paspalum (Platinum TE variety) golf course. While the course looked great from a distance, it was clear that the grass selection presented its own challenges. While Micah can talk more about this from...
05
May
2012
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Saigon, San Miguel, and Shade
Except for the superb mountain course at Dalat, with a lot of kikuyugrass (Pennisetum clandestinum) on the fairways and creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera) greens, all courses at Vietnam have been planted to seashore paspalum or bermudagrass. This is a mistake....
03
May
2012
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Singapore and Thailand from my perspective
Our first stop during the 2012 Asian Turfgrass Roadshow took us to Singapore. For me, it was about 22 hours in the air (through Tokyo) and a 12:30AM arrival on Monday night/Tuesday morning. Knowing that I wasn't going to be able to sleep right off the flight, I had recent...
01
May
2012
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Turfgrass Seminars at Singapore and Bangkok
The Asian Turfgrass Roadshow 2012 started with a seminar at Sentosa Golf Club in Singapore, host site for the European Tour’s Singapore Open. Dr. John Kaminski, with only a few hours of sleep after his travel from the other side of the world, exactly twelve time zones away, gave two...
30
Apr
2012
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Fungicide book, and thinking about summer patch – earlier than usual
It’s been awhile since we’ve plugged this book, so I’ll do it again: It’s a terrific resource for any turfgrass manager. You can find more details about the contents and purchase it at this website: http://www.apsnet.org/apsstore/shopapspress/Pages/43924.aspx Summer patch Summer patch symptoms tend to...
13
Apr
2012
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Frost impacts new growth in lawns
The unprecedented warm weather in March led to all sorts of plant anomalies, including early flowering in trees and shrubs, germination of annual grasses, and spring green-up of cool-season turf. Although perennial cool-season grasses are well equipped to withstand sudden and extreme temperature drops, new, succulent leaf tissues are susceptible...
09
Apr
2012
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Early early early
The temps have been warmer than normal, in some cases WAY warmer. Here in Manhattan it was 89 on April 1. Even the warm-season grasses are growing like mad. Along with the early plant growth, plant diseases are...
06
Apr
2012
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Some Much-Needed Rain and Some Unwanted Diseases
In Oklahoma and the Southern Plains, we received some much-needed rain to help offset the drought that has persisted over the last year or so. Some areas of Oklahoma received as much as six inches of rain over the last 10 days. Many have welcomed this, but it...
26
Mar
2012
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An Excellent Question Without a Good Answer
What's that question? It is the one posed most frequently by delegates to this week's Sustainable Turfgrass Management in Asia 2012 conference: How can we control bermudagrass in seashore paspalum? The conference saw 210 delegates from 20 countries assemble at Thailand's popular beach resort of Pattaya to discuss turfgrass management...
17
Mar
2012
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A New Year and Winter Meetings
Happy belated New Year! I know I haven’t had a recent contribution to the blog, but things got pretty busy for the Turf Team at Oklahoma State University this fall and into the new year. We had our 66th Annual Oklahoma Turfgrass Conference and Trade Show in Stillwater in...
26
Jan
2012
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Mid Atlantic
The unprecedented warm weather in March led to all sorts of plant anomalies, including early flowering in trees and shrubs, germination of annual grasses, and spring green-up of cool-season turf. Although perennial cool-season grasses are well equipped to withstand sudden and extreme temperature drops, new, succulent leaf tissues are susceptible to ...
The unseasonably warm winter has prompted many inquiries about the persistence of fungicides applied for snow mold suppression. We have an experiment that is evaluating the persistence of two commonly used snow mold fungicides, iprodione and chlorothalonil. Basically we applied the fungicides to plots thatwe keep free of snow cover and ones that are kept under snow cover for the duration of the experiment. We take two cup cutter samples from each plot. One is used to determine the concentration of the fungicides using commercially available ELISA kits for iprodione and chlorothalonil developed by Horiba LTD. The other core is...
It’s been a busy week for golf course superintendents in the region as diseases are in high gear and the heat and temperature stress are causing many golf course putting greens to decline. We are hearing a lot of reports of yellowing and discoloration to bentgrass putting greens, possible nematode issues, and the typical diseases that we would expect to see at this time of the year. Rain storms that swept through much of the mid-Atlantic provided some much needed relief from the drought we were in, but in many cases the rain fell too fast and basically moved via...
First, I’d like to welcome Maria Tomaso-Peterson to the blog. She posted the other day and you can catch it here if you missed it. It’s been a while since I have sat down and looked at the weather since I’ve been traveling, but I got a quick glimpse of what Megan, Jim, and Damon were referring to when I looked at the forecast for this upcoming week. According to weather.com’s 5-day forecast, temps are going to peak Thursday through Saturday and everyone from Washington, D.C. along the coast and up to Boston are going to be hit with temperatures...
Today I got a sample in from a golf course superintendent in New York. The sample was thinning and several of the plants had a bleached appearance almost like you would see following the application of Tenacity (they didn’t put any of this out BTW). Upon further inspection, there were no signs of any pathogen (no Pythium, bacteria, or any other fungi…I don’t check for nematodes so not sure about this). One thing that was interesting was the elongation (not etiolation) of the stembases and stolons. The symptomatic plants had roots being initiated a good inch or so down from...
So far the summer has been very busy for all of us and I personally apologize for not posting as much as I would like. You would think that posting an update a week would be easy, but it is once again proving difficult with all of the research, internship visits, website development and other things that I am currently working on. The good news is that we are rolling out several new bloggers to the site in the next month. I will let them introduce themselves in their first post as Dr. Damon Smith did in his first post...
With the recent spell of “warm” weather in combination with relatively high humidity, there were outbreaks of diseases we may typically see in June or even July. I reported a couple of weeks ago that things seemed to be picking up fast on the disease front. However, things seem to have slowed down again…at least for the time being....
Yesterday (this was meant for yesterday, but new disease activity today [Tuesday] has me posting a day late) I had the pleasure of hanging out at the Rutger’s Annual Golf Classic which raises funds for their research program. I even got to play a little golf with our Midwest blogger Jim Kerns. Having left State College on Sunday and not really seeing much of anything on the disease front at Penn State, I was excited to find out if there were any actual turf diseases in the field…we hit the jackpot in North Jersey. While certain diseases like anthracnose, leaf...
Here we are only a few days away from May and we are dealing with all sorts of problems in the Northeast. I just got off the phone with a superintendent in Connecticut who is dealing with some dead grass due to the crazy weather we have had. In his case, a late season freeze following some heavy rains resulted in some serious crown hydration problems. Although I don’t have any photos to share (not that he would want them out there), the solution that we both agreed on was a good pummeling. His greens are nearly 100% Poa and...
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