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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gray snow mold
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...
View of St. Francis Links and St. Francis Bay in South Africa Things have been very hectic around here so I have not had much of a chance to post anything in a while. Following a week long trip to South Africa (more on this next weekend), I fired up the old (actually it is only a few months old) computer to have it completely crash on me. That was about 10 days ago and I have yet to get it back. Shouldn’t there be some sort of insurance on these things for lost work time. If I were running...
It is really nice to experience a warm-up in Mid-February, but we know that it is a likely a cruel trick from mother nature. NBC 15 in Madison just said that Monday could yield 5 to 10 inches of snow, if all the expected precipitation is snow. Yet, today temperatures exceeded 40 degrees in Southern Wisconsin and is expected to exceed 50 degrees tomorrow! Its funny that I get excited about 50 degrees, when I was in North Carolina I considered that cold. As the warm-up continues, the snow will be melting and gray snow mold and Microdochium patch may...
I’m at snow-covered Hokkaido for some seminars this week and one of the things I have mentioned in the seminars is the possible increase in snow mold damage that can occur with high rates of potassium application in the fall season. Dr. Kerns mentioned the research being done at Cornell now to investigate this phenomenon. We came across this observation on an L-93 field trial that we had designed to study soil testing methods, not snow mold. What we found, as you see below, is that plots treated with potassium in the previous year (and to which no fungicides were...
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