Fusarium Damage

While golfing in the winter months you likely notice the patches of damaged turf throughout the course.  The cause of this damage is a fungal turf disease called fusarium.  Left untreated, fusarium can and will cause significant damage that will not fully recover until conditions improve and appropriate corrective measures can be taken.  Our current budget affords us the opportunity to apply preventative fungicide applications to our greens and approaches.  Without these preventative applications, our greens would be devastated by the fungal pathogen and would be virtually unplayable.  Sometimes the disease pressure is so high that the preventative applications "wear off" sooner than anticipated and turf disease can literally "pop up" overnight.  When this happens, and it already has this winter, we must apply additional fungicide applications to clean up the damage and prevent more from occurring.  You can really see the effectiveness of our fungicide applications in the photo below:

#4 approach: turf on the left side is treated while the right is not

This evidence again reiterates the importance of fungicides to turf managers as part of our arsenal against these damaging pathogens.  Without them, golf as we know it today would be not be possible; that is the simple reality of it.  Golf courses would not fully recover from this type of damage until well into the summer months and shortly after that the high disease pressure would return and the damage would occur again.  We must also take preventative measures when it comes to anthracnose.  Anthracnose is another turf pathogen that causes significant damage and the pressure for it begins in the spring and carries on into the fall season.

I truly hope this helps everyone understand the importance of being able to properly apply control products against turf pests that we know will ultimately attack our turf.

That being said, we are walkmowing greens today; not bad for January 31st!  Unlike the rest of the country, our turf does not go dormant in the winter months and continues to grow.  Obviously the growth drastically slows down, but it does still require an occasional mowing.  I guess it's just one of the many perks of living on the west coast!

walkmowing #4 green