Welcome to the “Turf Agriphone” sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. This message is being recorded for the period of Aug.-25- Sept. 1, 2006
Some much needed gentle rain is falling at the moment and is forecast to continue until Saturday. The temperatures for the coming week are very moderate, which will be good for turf growth and recovery and for newly seeded turf.
Diseases
The disease of the week is definitely rust. We had our GTI Turf Research Field day yesterday and everyone went away with rust spores on their shoes. Necrotic ring spot and take-all patch symptoms will also still be visible and dollar spot has exploded, especially on irrigated turf. We have lots of it on our green surrounds in the Kentucky bluegrass. I expect you will also be seeing it on irrigated fairways that haven’t been treated.
Insects
It is getting harder and harder to find hairy chinch bugs. With the cooler day and night temperatures, they are starting to migrate to their overwintering sites. The window for spraying for them is definitely over. We saw the first European crane fly adults yesterday. Based on this their flights could be a bit earlier than usual, but I will keep you posted as the flights start to take place. Funnily enough, we haven’t been able to find any European crane fly pupae yet in our routine monitoring. Another interesting phenomenon that we have observed this summer is some sort of small mammal digging for leatherjackets on the native sand green here at GTI. This has also been observed on home lawns in the Niagara Falls region. We thought that it was only starlings that were interested in leatherjackets, but it appears that small mammals are also interested in feeding on them.
European chafer grubs are also developing quickly now and are in their early second instar. It is still a good time to treat with a curative treatment of Sevin T&O if you are finding grubs and did not apply an application of Merit. Now is also an excellent time to use entomopathogenic nematodes to control grubs. Make sure to apply at dusk or on a cloudy day and water them in. Also, they work best if applied to moist soil.
Weeds
Broadleaf herbicide treatments should be postponed until after the winter annual weeds have germinated. The best time is in mid September. That way you can get a bigger bang for your herbicide buck. If however, you are renovating a lawn that has a severe broadleaf weed infestation, it might be wiser to apply the herbicide now so that the weeds are dying by the time you overseed.
Cultural Practices
As I mentioned earlier, it would probably be a good idea to apply some nitrogen in the next week or two. With the cooler temperatures, turf is going to go through a flush of growth as long as water isn’t limiting. This is the first step in the fall fertilization program. This is particularly important for areas that are infested with crabgrass. If you can thicken up the turf stand, it will hopefully be able to crowd out the crabgrass next spring. Now is also an excellent time to overseed damaged turf areas. There has been a lot of damage from hairy chinch bug feeding that could stand to be overseeded. Make sure that you have good seed to soil contact. The timely rains will help insure good germination and establishment.
Again, thanks for phoning the turf agriphone message for this week. The next agriphone message will be recorded on Fri. Sept. 1, 2006.
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