Welcome to the “Turf Agriphone” sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. This message is being recorded for the week of July 27 – Aug. 3, 2001.
It is still incredibly dry, but we have exchanged the hot humid weather with warm dry weather. Much of the non-irrigated turf here in our area has gone dormant. You may want to consider watering with about 2 cm of water every week just to keep the turf alive. Dormant turf will stay alive for up to six weeks usually, but we have many areas in the province that have not had a good rain now in almost that amount of time. As far as precipitation is concerned, most locations have only received half of last year’s precipitation and some areas such as Peterborough and Trenton have only received one third of last year’s precipitation. With the current weather there will be little risk of the summer diseases occurring now. We will still see dollar spot, take-all patch and anthracnose basal rot over the next week. On irrigated home lawns there is some dollars spot developing now.
Japanese beetle adults flights have slowed down now. We are very quickly approaching the end of the Merit window for European chafer and Japanese beetle grub control. The label recommendation is to apply it from June to Aug. 1st. Again, be sure to water it in.
Hairy chinch bug adults are present in lawns right now and are feeding very actively. Because the lawns are dormant, we are not seeing the brown patches caused by chinch feeding. Chinch bugs will be feeding on dormant turf for the most part and we will probably run into a situation like we did in 1999. Come late August when the rains return, people will find that their grass is dead. There has also been some billbug damage reported in the Toronto area. There have been many reports of lots of sod webworm moths out right now. Damage from sod webworm is usually seen in about a month’s time.
It is best to suspend all cultural practices and fertilizer applications if turf is dormant.
The Sports Turf Association are having their 14th Annual Field Day on Wed. Aug. 15, 2001 at the Millenium Park Complex in Waterloo. For information on how to register, please call the Sports Turf Association at (519) 763-9431.
Again, thanks for phoning the Turf Agriphone for this week. The next agriphone message will be recorded on Fri. Aug. 3, 2001. – See more at: https://lawnsavers.com/turf-hotline-2001/turf-agrifax-week-16-2001-july-27th-2001.html#sthash.eqv6a62P.dpuf
