Mites, Weather, Australia, and Dollar Spot

I'm posting this from Australia where the winter is just beginning. At the Redlands Research Station near Brisbane today I saw plenty of dollar spot on seashore paspalum. Pictured is a plot of Sea Isle Supreme. These are the typical symptoms of dollar spot that occur when the growth of seashore paspalum is slow.

I also saw some interesting mite damage yesterday on bermudagrass (or green couch as it is called here). From a distance the area pictured below looked as if it were suffering from drought stress, but upon closer inspection these severely stunted shoots, so typical of mite damage, were found. Last year I saw mite damage at Bangladesh and wrote about it in this post.

At Thailand last week I visited four golf courses. There were two with zoysia greens and two with TifEagle greens. One had seashore paspalum fairways, one had zoysia fairways, another had bermudagrass fairways, and another had native grass fairways. I'm fascinated by the types of warm-season grasses that grow in different parts of the world, and clearly the weather has a lot to do with that. Some grasses thrive in one area, while others struggle. I put together a series of bubble charts that plot world cities by their climatological normals, the average weather data over a number of years.

I'll be updating these charts monthly on www.blog.asianturfgrass.com. As the northern hemisphere summer progresses, we will see that transition zone cities such as Atlanta, Osaka, Shanghai, and Tokyo move very close on this bubble chart to places where only warm-season grasses are grown such as Miami, Singapore, and Tahiti. The difficulty of managing cool-season grass during the summer is shown clearly when the average weather conditions are the same as in tropical cities.