Kansas Snow Conference, I mean, Turf Conference

Hello from a cold and snowy Kansas,

Yes, I know the 6-8 inches we got here can't compete with the 15+ inches Jim experienced up in Wisconsin. He's probably barely shoveled out his driveway by now. But, 6-8 inches is big news for us. As a native of the north country, I'm a big fan of snow.

Unfortunately, the snow did put a little bit of a damper on our Kansas Turf Conference which was Tuesday-Thursday over in Topeka. Some folks could not make the drive (I myself saw plenty of cars in the ditch on I-70 on the drive over), and many of our usual participants from the lawn and landscape side of things were busy out making money on their snow-plowing contracts. But, we still had fairly good attendance and on the upside, those that were there got extra attention, and extra donuts.

Our out-of-state speakers this year were John Stier from U of Wisconsin. I'm not sure how he dodged blizzards on both ends of his travel, but he did make it in. John was a highly energizing and entertaining speaker. We also had two speakers from Oklahoma State, plant pathologist Damon Smith and entomologist Eric Rebek. Both of them provided great updates from our neighboring state to the south. In from the east coast was Grady Miller from NSCU. Grady was a favorite in our athletic field workshop. Finally, we had some USGA updates from Larry Gilhuly.

Thanks to all who braved the weather to come on out.

At the conference, I continued my multi-year dominance of my category in the "longest drive" contest. Our student GCSAA chapter sets up a camera and some netting, and as a fundraiser for them you can pay a little bit to enter the competition. Of course, I also came in LAST place in my division. As one of the few women at the turf conference, and the only one who ever enters, I always win first place while simultaneously coming in last. My score was 198, which was beter than last year's ~120 (I'm not very good!)

Finally, over beer one night, I heard one of the more funny things I've heard in awhile, "You know you are getting old when ibuprofen is your drug of choice."

Switching topics, you might remember I posted a photo of some striped chilling damage in bermudagrass awhile back. I'll post that again here. A week or so ago, someone emailed to me the second photo, showing frost in some fescue. It's a little hard to see with the shadows, but that certainly looks like the same type of pattern, eh?

To wrap up, last time I mentioned some yellow patch and in the follow-up comments there was some chatter about brown ring patch. We did confirm in the lab that the fungus was indeed the yellow patch pathogen. So far, brown ring patch has not been detected in Kansas but I'm keeping my eyes open.

And, Frank, don't worry about publishing on Friday. Actually, I think we should ALL post something on John's day, just to get him riled up :)