Crown hydration, Poa seedheads, and other headaches

Here we are only a few days away from May and we are dealing with all sorts of problems in the Northeast. I just got off the phone with a superintendent in Connecticut who is dealing with some dead grass due to the crazy weather we have had. In his case, a late season freeze following some heavy rains resulted in some serious crown hydration problems. Although I don't have any photos to share (not that he would want them out there), the solution that we both agreed on was a good pummeling. His greens are nearly 100% Poa and we decided that disturbing the soil as much as possible to create a seedbed (there is probably millions of seed in his seedbank) is the best bet to get green turf as soon as possible. We are fortunate that it looks like decent temperatures for growing grass should be here for a while (unless all of the sudden it goes right to summer).

Within the last few weeks, we were also able to rate our snow mold trials. Rather than go into too much detail about this, I have posted our final report and a pdf of the individual treatment images in my dropbox file (link) . Feel free to download them, but they won't be up there forever. Instead the report will be moved to the Penn State site once we can get it uploaded. Other than recovery from the typical winter problems, I have already started hearing rumblings about the following diseases being active: anthracnose, brown ring patch, fairy ring, yellow patch (aka., cool temperature brown patch), microdochium patch, and probably others that I forgot to mention.

What most people have on their mind right now is 1) the success of the Poa seedhead programs and 2) the start if they haven't already started of the early season dollar spot treatments. Due to weather problems, we didn't get our early season trials out until yesterday, but our seedhead trials (applied at various timings between 200 and 500 GDD) have all gone out already. We are just now starting to see some seedheads, but ratings probably won't tell us much until this week or next. If you have any thoughts or input on what you are seeing or how your Poa seedhead treatments worked out for you, please pass them along in the comments or on the Turf Diseases Facebook Page.

Finally, if you were wondering about my South Africa post, I just got my computer back last week and haven't had a chance to upload my pics. I hope to get to them this week so the post can hit this weekend. Good thing that Dr. Woods gave us a great International Disease Post last weekend.