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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brown patch
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...
Hello everyone. Wow, I can’t believe it’s the last Friday in August. Where has the time gone? Here at KSU we are gearing up for our field day which will be Thursday, Aug 4, over at the Olathe Horticulture Center (near Kansas City). For me, field day always indicates that there are only a few more weeks to get through before cooler temps set in. Here is a summary of recent high and low air and soil temps here in Manhattan: You can see we’ve had a lot of 100+ days. And, perhaps more importantly, we’ve had some very “high...
Well it looks like most of the country is in the grip of this heat wave now. We are working on day 29 of days over 100 F for 2011. According to the Oklahoma Climatological Survey map, we average approximately 15 days per year over 100 F. Our record is 50 days and we haven’t even made it to August when we typically have our “hot and dry” weather. So….it is going to be a tough summer season again this year. In our diagnostic lab we are getting a lot of creeping bentgrass samples with high nematode populations and/or suffering...
HOT HOT HOT We’ve been cooking over the past week. We are not as bad as Oklahoma. Just reading Damon’s post made me break into a sweat, both with the thought of those high temperatures AND the thought of the number of samples he’s dealing with. It hasn’t been quite that extreme just a bit north, where I am located. But, this current week has been nasty, with more 100+ on the way. Localized dry spot: This photo was sent in with a subject line that said “Help!!!” While I am not a fan of diagnosing based only by photo,...
We have seen relatively few disease issues in the TDL the past month or so. Throughout Upper Midwest temperatures have been warm, but we have also been quite dry. However the forecast for next week is very different. Highs for next week will been in the low to mid-ninties, more importantly night time temperatures will exceed 72 for most of next week. I included a 7-day forecast from NBC 15 here in Madison, but areas west and south of us will likely experience even hotter temperatures. I know that doesn’t compare with the excruciating heat experienced by those in the...
Hello, I am back in the US after an agriculture development trip to Tajikistan. If any of you are curious about that, you can check out this website where I have some notes and photos. The photo above is me with the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border mountains in the background.. . https://picasaweb.google.com/mmkennelly/TajikistanVisit2011?authkey=Gv1sRgCMvxxJn_moCCKg . .Anyway, back here on the home front dollar spot is active in putting greens and fairways. Though I have not seen it yet with my own eyes, I have had a few reports of brown patch activity as well. In addition, with some of the recent heat and wind...
I sometimes find such healthy grass that I have little disease to write about, but this week was an exceptional one. I went from Kanchanaburi to Bangkok, Singapore, and Da Nang, seeing a number of grasses and on them an assortment of pathogens. Click the thumbnails for a full-size image and description. If there were an award for diseases, seashore paspalum would win this week, with two different unidentified diseases and slime mold and dollar spot, with a bonus for some extraordinary drought stress. In the image below, there is an unidentified patch disease and dollar spot on a seashore...
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