Dollar spot and large patch

Hello,

First, apologies for not posting last week. Ongoing computer issues continue to plague me. I actually tried, but there were mysterious errors, and it was nearly 7 pm on a Friday and I was too hungry and tired to figure it out. Then, guess what, our internet at home bombed out over the weekend thus ruining my plan to sneak in a late post on Saturday. Then, I gave up.

Dollar spot is the main disease right now. I have a trial in a Crenshaw/Cato (highly susceptible) area at our KSU research facility. Dollar spot pressure has increased dramatically in the past couple of weeks. The figure below shows disease progress in the untreated areas. Yesterday was the most recent rating date, with average severity of nearly 45%. That is, almost half the plot area was covered with dollar spot!



The image below shows two treated plots surrounded by untreated areas. If you look closely, you can see where our sprays did not quite hit right on the plot borders. (We ignore those in our assessments). This particular experiment is small, with only a few treatments. The treatments, which are all holding disease to zero, were:

Insignia (0.5 oz) + Trinity (1.0 oz) 14 -day
Emerald, 0.13 oz, 14-day
Emerald, 0.18 oz, 21-day
Honor, 0.83 oz, 14 day
Honor, 1.1 oz, 21 day

Large patch is the other disease on people's minds right now. We have a lot of zoysia around here, especially in the Kansas City metro area. Normally the 3rd or 4th week of Sept is recommended timing for preventative apps but with the cool, wet conditions I have been recommending going a little earlier (that's one of the things I tried to blog about last week, but did manage to send in a different KSU email newsletter). In fact, a few traces of large patch were visible at our research facility this morning. And, a superintendent in northeast KS emailed me and said that some large patch was becoming visible in some of his fairways. I'll be spraying about 14 different treatments in a large patch study at a golf course on Monday.

Moss is another favorite pet here at K-State and this morning I worked with a graduate student and my colleague Dr. Jack Fry to apply a few moss treatments in our study. We are looking at sodium bicarbonate (that's baking soda), potassium bicarbonate, MossBuster (you might have seen that advertised in trade magazines), and Quicksilver. The MossBuster is an essential oil (the label is not very specific), and we think it may be oregano because that's sure what it smells like. It makes us all hungry for pasta.

Finally, I wanted to note that despite all the problems caused by wet weather this year (such as leaf spots defoliating a bunch of trees, turf drowning in wet soil, etc), it has led to a bumper crop of some of our favorite prairie wildflowers.