No More Please!

I Give Up, Please Stop Raining!

Hopefully the forecast is correct and we will be getting some much drier and cooler weather in the coming weeks.  Staley has received 10 inches of rain in the month of July and 8.5 of that has come after the 15th. There is nowhere for the water to go at this point.  The taller bentgrass on tees and fairways has fought against high heat and humidity for 2 months now and it is extremely tired.  All the added moisture makes it highly susceptible to mechanical damage from golf cart and mower tires, or the twisting action of feet on tees.  Add to that the highest disease pressure I have seen in 10 years and you have a great recipe for the butt kicking of Brien.   Thank goodness we only have a month to go until grass wants to grow again.

My main goal of this post is to address the disease that we are seeing on tees and fairways at right now.  The main culprit is Brown Patch and it is everywhere.  We started seeing it on the 23rd of July on tees and fairways.  If not controlled preventatively, this disease will start showing up around the start of July or late June if humidity levels are high.  We made our first preventative app on the 30th of June and it should have given us 28 days of coverage.  Our second app was scheduled for the 20th of July because it usually takes the chemical 3 days or so to work its way into the part of the plant it needs to be in.  Well........it rained 1.25" that day.  And then it rained .75" the next day.  So at this point its Wednesday and we need to spray greens, tees, and fairways so greens got priority. Plus we needed to mow tees and fairways before we could spray them.  Then tees got sprayed thursday and fairways friday.  Brown Patch had already started showing on Thursday so just like that we are sunk and playing catch-up.  I am still confident in the initial chemical that we used and I believe that it let go of the rope early due to being less effective at the end of its life span and the weather driven disease pressure was through the roof.  Our second application should be in the plant well by now and stopping the spread of the Brown Patch so that the turf can start to heal.  However, extra moisture and clouds are pretty poor healing mechanisms.  

So this past week my rain gauge said we only got 2" and I know that may be hard to believe with as wet as the course is, but when an area reaches field capacity it doesn't take much rain before you see standing water and saturated ground.  So due to all this water at the surface, all the Brown Patch areas have started forming a nice black algae just in case it didn't look bad enough already.  This is really evident in the fairway troughs.  I have not noticed any algae on tees and I am thinking that is due to the deep tine aerification they got tuesday and wednesday.  Don't get me wrong, the tees are still soaked, but the holes provided the water a place to go instead of sitting on top. So, yesterday I took out our Air2 G2 machine and injected air into these saturated fairway troughs just to try to open up some channels for the water to find.

So bring on the cooler and drier weather and lets get things healed up to where we were at the beginning of July.  The forecast looks favorable through the middle of August so thats a good start.  As always, feel free to stop me on the course and ask me anything.