Welcome to the “Turf Management Updates” sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. This message is for the week of July 19 – 26, 2007.
Weather
Except for being dry, we can’t really complain about the weather that we had last week. It was generally sunny with moderate temperatures. There have been various series of thunderstorms moving through, with localized flooding in some areas and just a sprinkle in others. Hopefully, some of the thunderstorms will alleviate the very, very dry conditions around the southern part of the province. The forecast for the week is a warming trend with some hot temperatures later in the week next week. Apart from the thunderstorms forecast for today, there does not appear to be any significant rain in the forecast for the next week. There is nothing drastically new on the turf front from last week.
Diseases
With the relatively dry weather and the lack of real heat, the disease situation has been pretty good for golf courses and turf in general. The root diseases are the ones that are active at the moment, and the GTI Turf Diagnostics had diagnosed take-all patch, summer patch and necrotic ring spot. If you do encounter diseases that you cannot identify, don’t hesitate to send a sample in to the GTI Turf Diagnostics Lab.
Insects
European chafer adult flights have finally slowed down. Japanese beetle adults will continue feeding for the next several weeks. I have had some calls about Japanese beetles and it appears to me that they are spreading. Some of the calls are from areas that I didn’t think had Japanese beetles. I also found one at the GTI this summer and that is a first. In our scouting, we are seeing some first instar chafer grubs. We are getting close to the end of the window for preventative grub controls on turf areas that had grub damage in late fall or earlier this spring. A note on applying Merit to dormant turf, the people at Bayer Environmental Sciences think that a light watering before applying Merit on dormant turf and then of course watering it in, will help with the efficacy of the product for grub control. If the turf is dormant, as little as 1 mm of water is probably enough to get the product down to the grubs. For lawn care operators in the City of Toronto there is information posted on their web site about the use of Merit. See the related links below. On golf courses, cutworms, annual bluegrass weevil and ants continue to be a problem. There have also been some lawn armyworms on golf greens too. We are also seeing the second generation black turfgrass ataenius flying now. There usually isn’t damage from the second generation.
Hairy chinch bugs continue to develop. It is tricky with so much dormant turf to figure out if they are causing any damage yet. This is the ideal time in most areas to be treating for them. Again, I am seeing them mainly in the areas of lawns that still have some green turf. This makes sense because they feed by sucking the sap from grass plants and there isn’t much of that left in the turf that is already dormant.
– See more at: https://lawnsavers.com/turf-hotline-2007/turfgrass-management-agriphone-for-july-19-2007.html#sthash.IDyORNE3.dpuf
