Our first spray and broadcast speader applications were made to our greens this week. When the turf begins to green at the end of winter, cool weather diseases begin to show up on our greens. I always like to do a simple clean up application at this time to protect the plants from disease that has lingered from the winter or beginning to develop. We also apply a growth regulator product called Trimmit which we are using in an attempt to reduce the amount of poa on our greens and this product also reduces the growth rate of the turf as well. We made multiple applications in the fall and will make mulitiple applications this spring. We will reduce our rates in the spring to insure that we do not have a major loss of poa. The effect that we are trying to achieve is to give the bentgrass the competitive advantage over the poa. We want to see the bentgrass begin to become more prominient and fill in a single blade at a time in high concentration areas of poa. We also are incorporating new bentgrass seed into the turf surface in the fall to help place more bentgrass plants in areas where there are very few. Our greens average anywhere from 10% poa to some greens with 50-70% poa. A loss of even 5-10% of the poa on a 25-50% poa contaminated greens could be catastrophic not only for the green but on me as well. Slowly but surely is the way to go with this program. The extremely wet weather over the last two seasons has not helped this program. Poa loves moisture and cooler temperatures plus with the trees on our golf course, we have a tremendous seed bank of poa seeds being produced each season. As the bentgrass begins to gain the competitive advantage, we will do some preemergent applications in the late summer to reduce poa germination.
We also made an application of a granular fertilizer this week to assist our greens in their effort to green up. This will also give the greens a boost of energy going into our greens venting program which is planned in less than two weeks.
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