Welcome to the “Turf Management Updates” sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. This message is for the week of July 12-19, 2007.
Weather
After a quite a few sweltering days, temperatures have cooled substantially. The humidity has also dropped. One thing that hasn’t happened though is rain. There have been a few thunderstorms moving through, but usually the rain is spotty with many areas receiving nothing or it is so heavy most of it just washes away onto hard surfaces and into storm drains. This is the driest that I have seen for this time of year. We expect these conditions in late July and early August, but it is rare to have things so dry in mid-July. Environment Canada is forecasting rain on Saturday. Let’s hope that his actually materializes.
Dry Conditions
Some of this management report is going to sound like a broken record, but really the overwhelming factor at the moment in the turf world is the dry conditions. Many municipalities have watering restrictions. What is quite noticeable is that many homeowners are accepting dormant turf and not bothering to try to water. This is quite different from a few years ago when many homeowners would make an effort. In general, if Kentucky bluegrass gets 0.5 cm of water every 4 weeks, it will stay dormant, but it will survive. Usually after about 6 weeks with little or no rain there starts to be some turf loss. Most dormant turf will recover when the rains do finally come. It is just a bit more fragile than a lush green stand of turf. Some general things to keep in mind with drought stressed or dormant turf:
Try to keep traffic off of dormant turf
Don’t fertilize or mow dormant turf
Regularly inspect lawn for turf insects
If you are watering turf there are a few tips to keep in mind.
Water in the early morning to prevent evaporation from sun or wind
Water deeply and infrequently and deliver roughly 2.5 cm of water per week
This may need to be done in a couple of applications to avoid runoff
Diseases
Dollar spot has a huge flair up earlier this week during the very humid period. Dr. Katerina Jordan at the GTI Turf Diagnostics Lab has diagnosed cases of summer patch and anthracnose this week. There have also been a few cases of Pythium root dysfunction. If you do encounter diseases that you cannot identify, don’t hesitate to send a sample in to the GTI Turf Diagnostics Lab. See the link below for details.
Insects
European chafer adult flights have continued this week and have been fairly heavy. Flights should be slowing down over the next week and ending in the middle of July. Japanese beetle adults will continue feeding for the next several weeks. We are in the ideal application 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. 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.
I have seen some third instar hairy chinch bugs now (the ones with the obvious white stripe across their abdomen). I am seeing them mainly in the areas of lawns that are still green. 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.
Weeds
As far as weeds go, now would be a good time to do weed counts on municipal sports fields. With the dormant grass the weeds are very obvious because they are the only green in the brown grass and are easy to find. Crabgrass is growing but even it is suffering from the dry conditions. It is definitely not a good time to apply Acclaim Super because the crabgrass is under drought stress.
– See more at: https://lawnsavers.com/turf-hotline-2007/turfgrass-management-agriphone-for-july-13-2007.html#sthash.I8OMda8F.dpuf
