Welcome to the “Turf Agriphone” sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. This message is being recorded for the week of Aug. 5-12, 2005.
Weather
The long term forecast for the upcoming week is for more hot weather with the humidity building. Day time temperatures will be around 30ºC. There are chances of thunder showers on Wed. and also later in the week. Night time temperatures are hovering in around the 20ºC mark.
Diseases
There will be a risk of the hot weather diseases such as Pythium blight, brown patch and anthracnose this week. The highest risk is in areas that are hit with thunderstorms. Expect the root diseases to continue to be a problem. All last week, samples have been coming in to the Turf Diagnostics run by Erica Gunn and the majority of them have either summer patch, take-all patch or anthracnose basal rot. Summer patch has been very severe with the heavy rain associated with thunder storms and the hot weather last week. The added problem now is the sunshine and low humidity are producing very high evapotranspiration rates. The turf with summer patch will die very quickly with this weather because it can’t take up the water that it is giving off. The other problem with annual bluegrass at the moment is that it has lost a lot of roots. The saturated soils are making it difficult for the roots to function. Roots need air to do their job. All of this is spelling disaster for stands of annual bluegrass on golf greens. A couple of things which may help keep your annual bluegrass alive now is to try to back off on irrigation to let air get into the roots and syringe the plants in mid-afternoon. This is especially critical on heavier soils that may be water logged and have little air in the rootzone.
We had a little flurry of dollar spot a couple of weeks ago when the weather was cool, but that has halted at the moment.
Insects
Japanese beetle adults continue to feed on the foliage of selected plants. This will last another week probably. Unlike European chafer, the adult Japanese beetles feed on a variety of flowering plants and the adults can be observed in the landscape. Merit is registered for control of Japanese beetle grubs in turf.
Many areas have not had rain now for a couple of weeks and non-irrigated turf is showing signs of stress and is starting to go dormant. It is critical to monitor for insect damage even if turf is dormant. Two insects that are causing damage at the moment are hairy chinch bugs and bluegrass billbug. Hairy chinch bugs such the sap from the grass plants and the plants are still well rooted. With bluegrass billbug damage, the damage plants will pull out easily when you tug on them.
There continues to be a sod webworm infestation on golf greens. It is not so much the sod webworms themselves, but the birds pecking them out of the greens. A new biorational insecticide has been registered in the last year for controlling sod webworm called Success which contains the active ingredient spinosad. You may want to consider this for the control of sod webworm. The soap flush technique works well to determine if you have them. Again, it is 4 litres of water and 15 mls of dishwashing liquid. Pour that on 0.1m2 of turf and wait for roughly a minute. If the sod webworms are there, they will wriggle to the surface.
The second generation of black turfgrass ataenius are flying in the southwestern part of Ontario now. If you have not had damage from the first generation, it is unlikely that you will have damage from the second generation.
Weeds
Crabgrass is rampant still. The rain that we had in mid-late July has brought on an absolute explosion of crabgrass. The issue here is that turf had thinned in June and July because of the dry conditions. Add a bit of rain and heat and presto – you get crabgrass. Some of the pre-emergence crabgrass treatments that went on early may have run out of steam before the first real flush of crabgrass came on. Crabgrass germinated later than usual because it was so dry in June. There is still time to treat it with Acclaim Super. Again, the nice thing about this is that it fits nicely with IPM in that you can treat only those areas that have crabgrass.
Cultural Practices
Over the next couple of weeks (roughly after Aug. 15), provided that the temperature returns to our seasonal normals, you can start up again with core aeration, verticutting, topdressing, overseeding, etc.. It is also a good time to fertilize turf to help it recover from the harsh conditions that it had to withstand this summer.
Thanks for phoning the turf agriphone message for this week. The next agriphone message will be recorded on Fri. Aug. 12, 2005.
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