Welcome back to the “Turf Hotline” sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs for the year 2000. This message is being recorded for the week of March 31 – April 7. This service will continue until mid-late September and the messages will be updated weekly on Fri. mornings. For those of you who are interested in either a fax or an e-mail copy of this message, you can order the service by calling my office at (519) 824-4120 x 2597 or you can obtain an order form from the OMAFRA web site at: www.gov.on.ca/OMAFRA/english/products/agrifax.html.
As everyone is well aware, this has been an extremely early year so far. I was looking back at some of my first hotline messages over the past few years and there is every indication that we are up to 3 weeks ahead of where we usually are this time of year. To summarize the winter quickly, it was the 4th warmest winter on record and we had much lower than average precipitation. One of the results of this is that there was almost no grey snow mould to speak of in the southwestern part of the province. There was not a long enough period of snow cover for grey snow mould to develop. As far as pink snow mould, there was some disease activity, but the pink snow mould scars are smaller than usual. This can be explained by the short period of snow cover. Voles are another one of the pests which usually cause nuisance damage during the winter. There was very little damage from voles either this winter.
One pest that is prominent again this spring is the European chafer grub. Grubs have been up near the soil surface for several weeks already. With some of the warmer nights where there isn’t frost in the ground, the raccoons and skunks have been foraging for the grubs. Starlings and other birds have also been pulling out tufts of grass in search of grubs. This brings me to the topic of spring grub control. The traditional products that we have used for grub control, diazinon and chlorpyrifos are not recommended for use on grubs in the spring. The grubs are very large, which makes them much less susceptible to the insecticides. They are not feeding much and they are relatively inactive at this time of year. Two things that are needed for insecticides to work is the grubs need to feeding or moving around a lot in the soil to insure that they get good exposure to the insecticides. The manufacturers of Sevin XLR Plus claim that their product works well in the spring. This is the first year that Sevin has been labeled for use on grubs so there is no proven track record yet. The other product Merit, which is also registered for grubs is definitely not active against grubs in the spring. With Merit the grubs should be targeted in the months of June and July.
At this point in the spring, it is best to rake up areas where grub damage has occurred and re-seed the areas a bit later in the spring. Sodding the damaged areas is also an option, but the sod growers have not started harvesting sod yet in this area. We are a week or two away from having sod available.
Again, thanks for tuning in to the hotline message for this week. The next hotline message will be recorded on Fri. April 7. – See more at: https://lawnsavers.com/turf-hotline-2000/turf-agrifax-week-1-march-31-2000.html#sthash.qKH6A5Pr.dpuf
