Welcome to the “Turf Management Updates” sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. This message is for the week of July 26 – Aug. 2, 2007.
Weather
gain, it has been another week of perfect weather for summer holidays, summer activities, etc.. It has not been a good week for turf, however. Many homeowners have chosen not to irrigate their turf during this drought. Many municipal sports fields are dormant and the traffic on them when they are dormant can cause damage to the turf stand. It has been difficult for sod farmers because they need to irrigate the fields that they plan to harvest. For golf courses with out of date irrigation systems, it has also been very difficult to keep up with the turf water demands and there are lots of localized dry spots due to poor coverage from irrigation systems. To date, I am not aware of any voluntary water taking reductions in any areas. During a season like this when turf has to rely on irrigation water as its only source of water, this is when poor quality irrigation water can take its toll on your turf. It may be a good idea to have your irrigation water tested at this point to determine if there are any problems. Also, turf problems that might have been attributed to things like disease may in fact be due to poor quality irrigation water. Even though the southwest has been very dry, areas to the east of us have had ample rain so the situation there is very different.
Diseases
The lack of rain has reduced the incidence of the foliar pathogens such as brown patch and Pythium blight. Also, the cool night temperatures have kept these two diseases at bay. What have been very active are dollar spot, summer patch, anthracnose basal rot, take-all patch and necrotic ring spot. There is a lot of very sick looking annual bluegrass out there. Some of it is disease and some of it is just heat and drought stress. So far I have not seen any rust, but in years that are dry, it often does become a problem at this time of year. It is usually favoured by alternating wet and dry conditions and so far we have only had the dry conditions. If you do encounter diseases that you cannot identify, please send a sample in to the GTI Turf Diagnostics Lab.
Insects
There are lots of hairy chinch bugs out now. This is the ideal time in most areas to be treating for them. It will be tricky on dormant lawns to detect any damage, so scouting for this pest becomes more important than ever. On irrigated home lawns, chinch bug damage is starting to show up now, even though they are generally less of a problem on irrigated turf. I have found a lot of adult bluegrass billbugs during routine monitoring. The bluegrass billbug damage has gone undetected because lawns are dormant. The down side of this is that when we do get rain, these damaged areas will not green up.
Only a few European chafer adults are still flying. Over the next week this should come to an end. There have been very large populations of Japanese beetle adults and these could potentially be around and feeding until mid-August. They have been reported in some new areas this year such as Scarborough and Cambridge. If you are concerned about turf damage from Japanese beetle grubs, there is still a week or so left in which you can apply Merit as a preventative control for European chafers and Japanese beetle grubs. If you are concerned about the feeding damage to ornamental plants there is information on the Nursery and Landscape Report.
Weeds
The dry conditions have kept crabgrass populations relatively low. There may be some plants that germinated quite a while ago while soils were still moist and maybe a few other plants if your area has received rain or frequent thundershowers. As far as broadleaf weeds go, there is very little that can be done at the moment to control them, but now is a good time to scout for them because they are the only bit of green in the dormant turf.
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