The trip from hell and current disease issues

For those of you following my twitter or facebook account, you probably already know that I had been stuck in Europe for the past two weeks. While I often heard comments like "there are worse places to be stuck" and "I wish I were stuck in Paris", the actuality of it is that the snowball effect of being stuck in Europe was not fun (although I will admit that Paris is now one of my favorite cities in the world). More on my travel problems below.

...as for the turf issues happening now.

While away, it was apparently back to some cooler weather around the region, but things are definitely starting to look more like spring around here each day. Annual bluegrass seedheads seem to be in full bloom and ratings taken last week confirmed that certain treatments can be effective at suppressing the seedheads when properly timed. I will mention that we did see quite a bit of damage as well from some treatments.

In addition to Poa seedheads, brown ring patch seems to be rearing its ugly head again this year. Remember to follow recommendations of found in previous posts to control the disease. Another chronic disease that is active in certain parts of the northeast is anthracnose basal rot. A sample was received today from a golf course that was showing active conidia (spores) of the anthracnose pathogen. I noticed reports of this disease a few weeks back, but believe that most have gotten it under control. This is definitely good news and cases of anthracnose starting this early definitely is not a good sign going into the season. When cases start extremely early (right after snow melt) we usually see things clear up and not persist throughout the year. When cases start showing up in May and June, then the disease seems to last all summer long and cause the most problems.

Early season dollar spot treatments should have been applied in most regions within the past 2 weeks as well. I have not kept up with what is happening in all regions, but at least from what I can see in State College, PA things have been considerably dry and we have even seen some drought damage starting to appear on putting greens. It seems a little early and many of you will push the limits early in the season in order to pre-condition the plants to the stress, but be careful not to go too far as damage has been observed this year.  Of course, rain over this weekend and early this week make the last few sentences a mute point.

As for my time in Europe...

Once the volcano in Iceland started sending ash everywhere all hell broke loose with regards to travel in Northern Europe. Flights were canceled across the board in what they called the worse air traffic problem; surpassing 9/11. In my attempt to get back to the states in reasonable time frame, I was shuttled from Paris to Amsterdam, back to Paris and then to Madrid. This involved about 10 hours in line at train stations, gouging in terms of pricing of hotels, and many hours on the trains. Finally, when we thought all was squared away we got stuck in Montpellier, France because the French train workers were on strike. We ended up renting a car and driving over 900 km through the night to arrive in Madrid at about 3AM on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. We finally made it out of Europe and back to the US at about 11PM Thursday night. For all of you hearing about the situation on the news...I can first hand say that it was worse than you could imagine!  Lesson learned though...when travel troubles like this occur in the future, you can bet that I will just find a seat in a nice street cafe in Paris and relax.  Chasing the travel only made things more stressful and didn't really get me home any sooner!

At least I got to see some cool things while in Paris:

Poll Results: and the winner is...

The results from the poll posted a couple of weeks ago is in and dollar spot is hands down the winner, with anthracnose and Pythium blight a distant second. A total of 41% of those voting indicated that dollar spot was their biggest challenge. This comes as no surprise to me as that week (August 9-15) marked the real "start" to intense dollar spot outbreaks in our area and apparently many other areas as well.

It seems that dollar spot gets a lot of attention on this blog as many posts have been dedicated to discussing this chronic disease. For this reason, I decided to show some of this year's "early season" dollar spot trials conducted at Penn State. I have been working with early season dollar spot since 2005. In most years, dollar spot can be suppressed with early season fungicide applications. Exceptions occur in atypical years in which the onset of dollar spot is delayed beyond what would be considered typical (late May to early June for most parts of the Northeast). Although dollar spot did not come on with a vengeance until July in 2009, data seemed to follow previous years. In our 2009 trials, Curalan (1.0 oz) again provided the best suppression of dollar spot over the course of the trial. Emerald also provided good control. Prior to a major outbreak of disease in early August, Curalan plots had an average of only 3.5 infection centers per plot (18 sq ft) when compared to the untreated control plots which had an average of 26 infection centers.

From the data (and previous observations at Penn State), it appears that resistant strains of the pathogen at our research plots limit disease suppression with the DMI fungicides. In previous trials at UConn where resistance was not an issue, good control with the DMI's was achieved. My observations from the past 5 years of data indicate that delaying the onset of dollar spot through early season fungicide applications serves two functions: 1) the delayed onset of disease gives superintendents more time to catch the disease once symptoms do start to appear; and 2) dollar spot suppression later in the season appears to be manageable as the disease doesn't appear to get out of hand during the fall.

Other issues in the region...
Perhaps if the poll had been posted one week later anthracnose may have taken the lead. In last week's posts from the West and South Central, Frank and Megan posted about rising anthracnose samples in their regions. Reports around the Northeast (from Rutgers) indicated that anthracnose activity was picking up as well. A walk through some of our plots at Penn State also indicated that anthracnose was increasing. However, this increase in anthracnose was on the creeping bentgrass. Disease activity on our annual bluegrass trials, however, remain very low. Pythium blight was also ranked as a moderate problem and the disease did make an appearance on some fine leaf fescue plots in the last week or so. At this point in time around the region, you can find just about every typical disease including summer patch, fairy ring, anthracnose, Pythium, brown patch, dollar spot, and others. Everyone SHOULD be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, however, as core cultivation programs are about to begin and temperatures suitable for turfgrass growth resume in the next few weeks.

Novel Dollar Spot Control Programs

Dollar spot has really been the only challenge this year for golf course superintendents. With the recent economic downturn we are investigating ways to help superintendents reduce fungicide expenditures while maintaining quality playing surfaces. I have mentioned our dollar spot forecasting project, in collaboration with Dr. Damon Smith at Oklahoma State University, in previous posts. We are applying the preliminary model Dr. Smith developed in Oklahoma in our environment in Wisconsin. To date, the model has accurately predicted dollar spot development and making applications based on the model has resulted in 4 fungicide applications this year. When we compare efficacy to other fungicides either applied on 14-day intervals or 21-day intervals, the forecasting model holds up well. The one exception was a high pressure weekend and some dollar spot developed in the forecasting plots. The graph at the top left of this post depicts our results so far this year. The red arrows indicate when the model triggered and the blue arrows indicate when we made a fungicide application for just the forecasting plots.

The model did trigger before June 22 as a result we made a fungicide application on June 16th. Typical dollar spot programs in the Upper Midwest start on June 1, which would result in 7 applications when repeated every 14 days. For the 21 day treatments we have made 5 applications so far. Either case we can save either 1 or 3 applications per year. Currently we are putting numbers to these savings. We are using a municipal course, high-end public, mid-range private and an elite private course. Hopefully this will make are numbers relevant for a lot of turf managers. Please stay tuned because there is more to come!

Another project we are working on is expanding early-season dollar spot control. Basically we made a single early-season application and followed those applications up with 3/4 rates of Banner Maxx/Daconil every 21 days or full rates of Banner Maxx/Daconil every 28 days. Interestingly, full rates applied on 28 day intervals are providing the same level of control as our conventional program. We have not started our economic analysis of this project, but I know we have saved at least one fungicide application in this experiment. Again please stay tuned to this project too.

I am very excited about Lane's post yesterday! I saw the data with Civatas and I was excited, but we have not tested the product in the Upper Midwest. I know Dr. Derek Settle has, yet I cannot remember what he found. Civitas is scheduled in our snow mold trials this year, so we will see how it holds up. As always nice work Lane.

Megan's story about visiting with Aron Hogden is pretty funny. Poor Aron thought she was just a normal person coming over to lecture him about spraying. Aron had no idea that he peaked the interest of a turfgrass pathologist! Megan you are lucky you got out there without an inqusition from Aron.