Poa seedheads, basidiomycetes, and the usual suspects

With the recent spell of "warm" weather in combination with relatively high humidity, there were outbreaks of diseases we may typically see in June or even July. I reported a couple of weeks ago that things seemed to be picking up fast on the disease front. However, things seem to have slowed down again...at least for the time being.

A quick walk around Valentine (Penn State's Turf Research Facility) was met with the usual suspects at this time of the year. We are seeing red thread and some leaf spot in the roughs, brown ring patch on the Poa putting greens, and today I saw what I believe to be superficial fairy ring (below). We are planning on isolating this one and hope to compare it to what we found over the last few weeks and what I have been calling Thatch Collapse (right). The SFR is showing up in my fertility plots, so it will be interesting to see if there is a difference based on N-source.

Other than that, Poa seedheads are in full force and we are seeing good control in select treatments. I hope to talk about this in the next few weeks once I get the data analyzed, but tentatively it looks like we are seeing good control with a few products and our application timings did make a difference in the level of control.