Sunday, 13 November 2016

How rolling can help fight climate change

OK that title is a bit much but bare with me.

It's no secret I'm a fan of rolling. It has a ton of benefits from faster and smoother greens to disease suppression. Ever since I got my first roller back in 2010 we have been rolling daily and cutting every other day or some version of this. Basically we roll the greens 2 times for every mow without significant impacts on playability of the greens. If anything this schedule of greens maintenance results in more consistent playing conditions.

The benefits of this are obvious when it comes to mower maintenance. If you use a mower half as much it will require about half the maintenance and last about twice as long. For me it has made it possible for us to use our only triplex mower for both greens and tees. We only need one mower for 2 jobs.
One mower,
Two sets of cutting units

This year we looked at fuel use savings. Aside from the cost of fuel, we are also concerned with the use of fossil fuels and ways we can reduce our reliance on them without impacting the conditioning of the golf course (ideally).

So right away we can see that if I am able to cut the amount of mowing in half I will save half the fuel spent cutting greens. But there is a cost to this and that is the amount of fuel spent rolling. For us, we roll every day that we maintain the greens. That means that we roll even when we cut the greens. This results in faster more consistent greens and helps with disease more than if we only rolled every other day. So when calculating the fuel savings we need to take into account the amount of fuel required to roll the greens.

For us, we use a Toro triflex to mow our greens and a Truturf to roll our greens. Ideally we would have an electric roller but we don't. The triflex uses about 6.9L of fuel to cut our 0.4ha (~1acre) of greens. Our roller uses about 0.75L of fuel to roll the greens.

This year we rolled our greens 216 times and used about 162 L of gas.

This year we cut our greens 107 times and used about 740 L of gas.

The total fuel use to maintain (cut and roll) the greens in 2016 (so far) was 902 L of gasoline.

To compare that with only mowing and no rolling we need to first figure out how many days we would mow if we didn't roll. To do this I took the number of unique days that the greens were maintained with either the roller or the mower. This came out to 188 days in 2016. The other 177 days a year we do nothing to the greens or only dew whip. It's also important to know that many of the times that we rolled were 2x per day for reduced disease, reduced poa seed head or extra green speed. The same can also be said for mowing except the only reason for that is increased green speed.

So if we had to mow our greens 188 times each year that would use about 1297 L of fuel.

Subtract the 902 L of fuel we use now from the mow only figure and that gives us 395 L less fuel used with our current program vs only mowing. That is a 30% savings.

You could find additional savings if you only rolled on days that you didn't mow. For me that would save an additional 81 L of fuel or 7% but with a significant decrease in green speed and disease suppression (hard to measure in the real world). In the end we have to balance carbon emissions with the environmental impacts of pesticide use and I feel that this is a good compromise.

You could also use an electric roller and essentially cut your emissions in half assuming your electricity comes from clean sources.

Either way, that's a big savings. I often have to work very hard to find minor savings and savings of 1/3 are rare especially when they actually improve conditions! Now ideally I would have rolled more so this would decrease the fuel savings slightly but the savings are still significant.

Of course there is the extra cost of labor required to roll daily and mow every other day. Rolling is quicker than mowing and the two combined take about the same amount of time of only mowing except you need an extra body for the days that you roll and mow. Rolling with a triplex mower with roller heads would take longer and use almost as much fuel assuming it's more fuel efficient to run rollers than turn reels.

I also haven't compared the fuel use of walk mowing because we don't have the labor for this. I suspect that the speed of rolling vs walk mowing would save money in labor with only slight savings in fuel use as walk mowers are probably more fuel efficient than a triplex mower. Remember, there are many variable that go into this so the saving's aren't universal. For me it turns out to be 30% in fuel and 0 labor savings or a net benefit to my operation and the environment.

It's not like I needed another reason to roll but by analyzing our fuel use I have yet another reason to roll more and mow less..

Thursday, 3 November 2016

Spot Spraying and Counting Disease.

Spot spraying has been a big part of my IPM program for the last few years. I hypothesized that winter diseases like fusarium on the coast aren't really that bad, we just make them worse by spreading them around. In order to capitalize on this theory I have been spot spraying my greens with traditional fungicides to attempt to limit that spread. During the time that I have been doing this I have never had such success managing my nemesis, fusarium.

On the surface, spot spraying seems like a pretty simple and basic tool. See disease, spray it. The problem is that it takes time and if it doesn't help you stretch the intervals that you need to apply a broadcast fungicide spray, then there is little point in doing it.

Where spot spraying really becomes a powerful tool is when you count and record the number of disease spots that you treat each day you spot spray. Counting and recording this data doesn't take any additional effort unless you find counting difficult. It does require that you are consistent in your data collection on all greens. Only doing one green or two won't give you as good of information as if you do all your greens.

For me, the time commitment is about 1 hour to treat my 0.4ha (1 acre) of greens. In the past month I have spent 4 hours of time spot spraying, $0.25 in fungicide and have required no broadcast fungicides on my greens. I typically spot spray once a week (or the day before mowing) through the winter when fusarium is active. I then record the number of spots in my google form on my phone. My form is simple and very quick to fill out and this makes it easy for me to be consistent in my data collection.
I use a simple google form on my phone which feeds
data to my spreadsheets automatically

Counting disease on my greens gives me a very good idea of how bad the disease is and when combined with data from previous spot sprays, I can roughly determine the disease pressure and how that is changing over time. This gives me an idea of when my fungicides are wearing off and what impacts my maintenance practices might be having. It also lets me determine without emotion, when I should spray.

Emotion is a huge driving force behind determining when to spray especially when you don't have a good quantitative figure on how bad the disease is. It is easy to panic when you see a few spots of active disease here and there but after a count you can see how bad it really is. This simple fact has helped me put off countless fungicide applications for a week or even a month or more! To measure is to know.

In order to prevent double spraying spots it is important to include a pigment in your spray. As the pigment fades and you come out to spray again it is very obvious which spots have been treated already and which ones are fresh. The human eye is a very powerful tool and after a while you will be very good at determining if disease is active or not.

I can look at the data collected and see which greens are the worst. As you can see on the table below, the first 3 greens have the most disease. As you go from one spray date to the next you can also see that the amount of infection sites is getting worse over time. The last broadcast fungicide was applied on September 24.

This kind of information can give you a great idea of which greens have the worst disease and can allow you to focus on why certain greens get more disease than others and possibly make changes to reduce the disease pressure on the trouble greens.

This data alone, however, doesn't give you a good idea of how bad the disease really is and how it is changing over time because it doesn't take the interval between disease counts or the area of each green. The following table shows the number of infection spots per 100m2 per day.

This information gives you a better idea of what the disease pressure is. As you can see the 1st and 3rd greens have about 8 new infection sites per 100m2 per day and that overall the number of infection sites per given area is going up at time goes on. Basically the disease is getting worse.

But why is it getting worse? Is it the weather? Fungicide wearing off? Or is it because of disease spread by mowers? This is important to know because if the majority of disease spread is by mowers, then a simple spot spray should end the disease pressure increase as long as you aren't mowing like crazy. After a period of time following the mode of disease spread the disease pressure should drop. If it doesn't the disease pressure is probably environmental and a broadcast fungicide will be needed.

So you can see that my disease pressure is rising but why? The picture below shows a cluster of disease around an old disease scar. Clearly I didn't spray this spot soon enough and it was spread by our mowers. The time it takes between when the disease is spread to when you can see it varies but seeing this can help you determine how long it really took. In the case below, was taken 7 days after the last mowing.

The pigments allow you to look back after spraying to see patterns in the disease and this also helps you determine just how bad the disease really is. A further out view of the above picture shows that this disease outbreak is isolated and the result of mower spread and not environmental pressure.

Please excuse the holes and fir needles. This was the day after deep tining greens after a heavy wind..
The transition from summer to fall is always a difficult time because the grass needs to be mowed more than one can spot spray. We are also often mowing in the rain but cannot spot spray in the rain as was the case last week and why we saw a spike in disease spread. As the Fall and Winter progress and our mowing frequency decreases we can get more effective spot sprays out before we have to mow and further reduce the chances that the mowers will spread the disease on our greens.

So with observations such as this, I can hold off with a broadcast spray confidently because most of the increased disease pressure is because of our last mow last week. Since that mowing the disease has had a lot of time and ideal conditions to infect the grass and grow to a point where I can see it and spray it. I have done 2 spot sprays since the last mowing and expect to do anywhere from 1-15 spot sprays (depending on growth rate) before our next mow. As time goes on I expect the disease pressure to drop without a broadcast fungicide application because we aren't spreading the disease around.

I think a lot of people who try spot spraying don't do it for long because they aren't getting the full benefit of spraying each individual spot. By counting and visualizing the disease on your greens you can get a better idea of why the disease is so bad and better determine when a costly broadcast fungicide application is needed.

Saturday, 29 October 2016

Visualizing how the growth potential model changed the way I fertilize my golf course

In my last post I outlined how the amounts of fertilizer applied to my golf course has changed over the years due to adopting the MLSN guidelines. In this post I will show some cool animated charts that show how the way I fertilize has changed as I adopted the growth potential model. Special thanks for Micah Woods for making these cool animated charts with my data. Refresh the page if the animation doesn't repeat.

This first chart shows the monthly nitrogen applications to my greens side by side going back until 2008. As you can see, as time goes on  the rates get lower but they also get more consistent with less big spikes. Looking back 8 years I can't help but wonder what I was thinking! It is really too bad that I don't have growth rate data going back more than a few years.

You can see that in early 2012 I was on a similar track to what I would normally be on. That was until I came across this article about using growth potential to determine nitrogen rates based on temperature by Micah Woods from 2012. I started using growth potential in late 2012 but didn't get into a good groove until 2014. This was because in 2012 I was just starting out and in 2013 I had to add more fertilizer to help my greens recover from winter damage. Since then I have lost very little grass and fertilizing has been business as usual with no major variances from the growth potential model.

The next animation shows the same thing as the last one except the monthly amounts are transposed on top of each other so that you can more easily compare how the rates per month changed.

The chart below shows the cumulative amount of nitrogen applied to my greens over the years. As you can see, my total annual nitrogen rates are where I used to be at in May! This has had a big impact on thatch as well as the amount that we need to mow our greens in the spring. It has also helped us get a better quality of cut during the poa seed head flush each spring.

Thanks again to Micah for making these charts with my data. I find it interesting to look back at what I have done and to compare it like this.

Next up is to try and figure out what changes if any I plant to make for my fertilizer practices in 2017!

Tuesday, 25 October 2016

Visualizing how the MLSN guidelines changed the way I fertilize my golf course

In my last disease update I looked in depth at my nitrogen use on a month by month basis to analyze what I was doing to see if it was the cause of my disease issues. During this process I decided to compile all my fertilizer data going back until 2008. Sadly I cannot find any records from before then.


Looking at these charts it is clear that before 2012 and my adoption of the MLSN guidelines that I had no clue what I was doing as far as fertilizer goes. The rates of P and K are widely variable as I was undoubtedly trying to chase cations or something.... All I can do looking back is shake my head but at the time I didn't know any better. I was just following the fertilizer recommendations based on the faulty BCSR. What a waste. It's no wonder that MLSN made so much sense to me when it was released in 2012. Fertilizer didn't make any sense to me!

Since that time the rates of all nutrients applied to my greens has gone down. From a high in 2008 to a low in 2016 I have only seen conditions improve during this time.

Looking at the above chart it's very obvious when the MLSN guidelines came out. Instantly P and K were no longer needed to provide a "balanced" soil or push spring root growth or summer heat stress tolerance.

So what happened in 2013?

I had a rough winter where I lost a lot of grass on most of my greens. Shade, poor drainage and golfing on frosty turf all contributed to the disaster. Looking back it was this catastrophic event the allowed me to starting working to remove shade and improve drainage and make a big difference.

Regardless, I had to grow some grass and as this happened the first year after adopting the MLSN guidelines I had my doubts. My greens were mostly poa and the best way to grow poa is to fertilize the grass so that's what I did.

The past few years have been disaster free and I have never applied less fertilizer on my greens. Part of it is because of the MLSN and the rest is from adopting the growth potential model for timing fertilizer applications.

The physiological impact of making such a drastic change to the way you fertilize your grass is huge. Because I made such huge and drastic changes all at once I was a bit worried. If anyone in the future decides to make the change to the MLSN guidelines I would suggest comparing where the MLSN guidelines will take you and for the first year meet it half way. That way the changes are slow and you won't have a panic attack like I did.

As you can see, 2015 and 2016 have been almost identical as far as macro-nutrients are concerned. This is because the soil levels for K has fallen down to the guideline and I am now applying K to stay at or slightly above the guideline. The soil doesn't contain any excess K.

Soil P levels have gone up even though I have applied no P fertilizer. This is from the slow conversion of phosphite to phosphate as I understand it.

The following chart shows all the nitrogen applied per month per year. It's a mess of a chart but there is one clear odd one out. July 2010. Jeeze I never thought looking at fertilizer rates would bring up so many bad memories!

In June 2010 my best friend's dad passed away. I went away to his funeral and when I came back this is how my greens looked.

Long story short while I was away the greens were watered for 4 hours during the afternoon with temperatures in the low 30C range. That's when I learned about how grass can boil to death. Needless to say I wanted to get them back in good shape ASAP as it was the middle of summer and this required a lot of fertilizer.

Wow, I've had a lot of grass die on me over the years.... But since the winter of 2012-2013 we haven't lost any grass and this is because we have put less reliance on adding more fertilizer to make the grass healthy and more reliance on providing adequate fertilizer, sun, and drainage.


The fairways at my course comprise about 10x the area that my greens do. Therefore any savings that I can make on my fairways will save me 10x as much money or more. My fairways are on native soil.

In 2012 I actually applied more N that the previous 3 years but make a huge reduction in the amount of P and K applied. At this time I was still applying fertilizer in a granular slow release form as this was the only way my equipment would allow me to spread fertilizer. I wasn't gutsy enough to apply granular nitrogen to my fairways so had to settle with a blended fertilizer.

In 2013 I got a big sprayer and started using urea because other superintendents had shared that they noticed no measurable difference between urea and slow release N except price. Since then I have taken soil tests on my fairways and they still have plenty of nutrients. We have only applied liquid applied fertilizer on our fairways since 2013.


We don't collect clippings on our tees therefore nutrient removal from mowing is less of a thing even though they are on a sand root zone. Again, I have no clue what I was doing back in 2009-2010. Must have been applying K for divot recovery or some crazy thing. Maybe I read that grass needs K at a 1:1 ratio with N. No clue.
In the end, the only thing that matters is that the tees have never been better or had less weeds (no herbicides used in the time of this data collection) and I have never spent less on fertilizer. Why apply it if it won't make things better?

It is especially concerning to see how much excess fertilizer I was applying back then that wasn't having a meaningful impact on the quality of our grass. The extra nitrogen was definitely having an impact on the quantity of grass as I have had almost no excess clippings to deal with over the past few years. We had one day in late August when growth rates spiked a bit due to heavy rains and most likely some soil mineralization. That was it and to think of all the effort we used to spend to try and reduce clippings with special mower attachments and endless mowing and blowing.

If you want to learn more about the MLSN I will be doing a talk with Larry Stowell from PACE Turf at this year's GIS in Orlando.

Saturday, 22 October 2016

1 fungicide app per year. Is there more to wood ash than we think?

It's no secret that I try pretty hard to reduce the amount of pesticide required on my golf course. I've tried a lot of things and over the years have refined my IPM strategy to only do what makes a real difference. They cost a lot, the public perception of pesticide use is negative, and it is a fun challenge to try and work towards reducing the use of pesticides on my golf course.

Things that didn't make a significant impact have been removed from my program. This past summer I went longer than ever between traditional broadcast fungicide applications or about 192 days. In previous years I would consider 60 days something to be proud of. Even so, I still required spot applications of traditional fungicides to stop disease spread and track the disease pressure of dollar spot on my greens.

Recently I came across this tweet.
Holy Smoke! Rob is making my efforts look like a joke.

I know Rob, he's the superintendent at the golf course in Terrace, B.C. They have a similar climate as here except they have a true winter with regular snow which requires a winter snow mold fungicide. In the past 2 years Rob has only had to apply his snow mold fungicide applications, and nothing else as far as traditional fungicides go. This is despite having as little as one month of snow cover in the winter.

I have heard of others doing the same or similar things but they are in much more arid climates where they have more control of moisture on their grass. On the West Coast of Canada we are inundated with rain for most of the year which makes disease management a huge issue to deal with (if my blog hasn't made that obvious already).

This is why Rob's tweet above got my attention. It's no joke maintaining good grass in this climate without traditional fungicides.

So what is Rob doing that I'm not? Well, a lot of things but this is what he thinks makes the difference.

Oh boy, here we go. I've had run ins in the past with compost tea users. Those who use it haven't been able to show me in a meaningful way that it works and this post isn't here to debate compost tea. My biggest issue with it has always been that it costs so damn much and doesn't make a significant dent in fungicide or fertilizer budgets. This is especially evident for someone like myself who already has an extremely low budget for both fertilizer and fungicide on greens. A 25% savings in fertilizer on greens will only save me ~$60 a year.

I guess if it wasn't for compost tea, Rob wouldn't have stumbled across this there's 1 benefit haha!

Another issue I have with Organic is that it usually comes with a compromise in quality. Not with Rob.
But Rob's approach is almost free. Now we are talking the same language!

He also shared these pictures of clear lines of suppression similar to what you would see with a traditional fungicide application. This really got my attention.
Or this on his tees.
So Rob has virtually eliminated the need for traditional fungicides while his turf is actively growing which is a big deal. And he hasn't just done it for one year, he has done it for two years. This suggests that it's not just good luck that is the result of his success. Further prodding Rob with questions revealed that he thinks that it is the ash and not so much the compost that is the reason for his disease management success.

I decided to do some internet research about wood ash.

Most of what I found had to do with the chemical properties of wood ash. It has varying amounts of plant nutrients and is used as a fertilizer in low pH soils as it has a very high pH. It seemed that everything that I could find had to do with either the nutrient content or the pH of the ash.

Then I came across some people who reported using ash to kill algae in their ponds. In some instances people report using 1 tablespoon of ash to treat a half acre pond! Wow that is a low rate for such a big impact. Surely this small concentration of nutrients and pH has no impact on that amount of water. It must be something else that is killing the algae or these reports are total BS.

Wood ash can also be used to make Lye or potassium hydroxide, a highly caustic product used to make soaps, drain cleaners and can be used to dissolve tissue. Yes it can be used to dissolve your flesh off your bones. Maybe this property is having some impact on the fungi? Hmmmm

Making Lye involves leaching ashes in water...exactly what could be happening when you put ash into a compost tea brewer. Maybe the combination of compost and wood ash has something to do with it?

Either way, it's worth taking precautions if this is the byproduct of putting wood ash in a compost tea brewer for a few days. Bottom line, be careful.

So with nothing to lose I have decided to give wood ash a try on my tees this winter. It's free, I have a ton of it (wood heating in shop), and it gives me something new to try and learn from. But in order to build off Rob's success I needed to know more so I decided to interview him to get all the goods. Big thanks to Rob for sharing so openly about what he is doing, this kind of attitude is what helps our profession grow and move forward.

Jason: What exactly are you applying to your greens?
Rob: We started with 8 cups (compost) and 8 cups (ash) and saw some improvement, went to 12 and 12 and have since backed to 10 & 10 (I measure out 10 cups of ash and it weighed 1.5kg (3.3 lbs)

Jason: How do you make it?
Jason: How big are your greens?
Rob: 122K sq ft of poa/bent

Jason: How often do you apply it?
Rob: Once a week with fert apps or less in the spring and fall when I don't apply much fert.

Jason: What spray volume do you spray it at?
Rob: 125 gallons does all greens and collars. (about 1 gallon per 1000sq ft or 3.8L per 100m2)

So he's applying about 12g ash in 3.8L water/100m2 every week. (0.4 ounces in 1 gallon per 1000 sq ft) With that rate I could apply it to fairways!

Jason: How did you come across this?
Rob: I just noticed that grass grows well after a spring burn so I tried it.

Jason: Do you think it is the biological aspect of the ash and compost combined or just the ash?
Rob: I've got our mix tested and very little biological benefits as I see it.

Jason: Do you apply it with other products?
Rob: I mix it with most ferts including Urea. Don't mix it with chelated calcium.

Jason: Do you think it's just the ash or other IPM practices as well?
Rob: I think the ash compost is the ticket. Our soil science has been worsening as my budget decreases. Greens pH as low as 5.3, low in many micros and high in hydrogen. Irrigation water that is so clean it strips nutrients

So there you have it. I will be playing with this on my tees this winter and will include control plots. I have already applied a heavy iron application 3 weeks ago which has knocked the fusarium back quite a bit. I will stop the iron and switch to the ash applications to see what happens. I will also do some applications on a few of my troublesome greens this winter along with control plots.
low tech compost tea brewer in action

Most of Rob's experience has come during the growing season as his course is covered in snow all winter. It will be interesting to see if it works at all during the cold winter months on my course. As he and I don't think it's the biological aspect of the ash or compost that is the reason for the control I think it could work even in the cold winter where the soil biology is slowed.

I am skeptical at this point but am open to the idea especially since it is free and will give me something to do this winter and maybe it will kill some grass! Something this easy and free just seems too good to be true. We all know that disease management involves a lot of factors and I am sure that Rob does a whole host of other things that result in his success. Will ash prove to be a viable disease management option for me? Stay tuned to find out!

Tuesday, 18 October 2016





Dollar spot

sprayed on the left, not sprayed on right (obviously)


I came across this interesting tweet this summer.


the worst of dollar spot on putting greens




















Silvery Thread Moss and the Moss Disease

Thatch collapse



Thatch Collapse


Total pest management cost




Saturday, 24 September 2016

EIQ is flawed so stop using it

And this is where everyone laughs at me.

"No one uses EIQ you dummy," is what you're probably thinking.

Well yeah, the too good to be true way to quantify pesticide toxicity is just that, too good to be true. It really is too bad because having an easy-to-use way to assign pesticides a toxicity was very convenient and promised to be a very powerful decision making tool.

For those of you who are concerned about quantifying pesticide toxicity it is helpful to learn why the EIQ doesn't work and what, if anything, we can use to quantify our pesticide use going forward.

Basically, the reason that that EIQ is flawed is that it relies way too heavily on application rate. The higher the application rate the higher the EIQ would be. The impact on rate was so high that a weed scientist, Andrew Kniss, assigned random values to the EIQ toxicity parameters 73,000,000 times and found that the random values "provided the same recommendation as the EIQ about 88% of the time." Basically, the EIQ is not better than nothing.

I first experienced this when trying to calculate the EIQ of Civitas. As it has a relatively high usage rate compared to other products, it had an insanely high EIQ. According to the EIQ it had an environmental impact comparable to chlorothalonil or quintozene. Quintozene has been banned here on golf courses so how could a product with a similar environmental impact be registered? It's simple, it couldn't, and this shows why the EIQ is not a good way to quantify pesticides.

....and all these years I thought I was making progress....

It gets even better if you calculate the EIQ of your irrigation system.

Yep, 1 acre inch of water has an EIQ of >1.5 million!

I don't know why we need to go any further explaining why it's flawed. Either way I highly suggest you check out the blog Control Freaks. It has a lot of good info from agriculture that can carry over to golf courses.

So what do we do? Calculating pounds on the ground is of little value as we all know some of the most toxic things come in small packages. Andrew Kniss again, had some good advice in this facebook coment thread. Or the Coles Notes version...

Basically we need to know where we are applying the pesticide, know the potential impacts they could have, and select a product which limits those risks as much as possible.

No preventatives and the grass is dead....
If this seems complicated it is because it is. But then I started thinking about all the work that our country's (Canada eh) Pest Management Regulatory Agency does to ensure that products are safe to use and ensure that the label has information on safe handling and use. Obviously, if we read and follow the label we shouldn't have any problems. If problems arise then maybe we need to look at updating the labels or removing the product from use as is currently done on a regular basis.

So now what? Do I just forget about reducing pesticide use because it's too hard to quantify and a waste of time? (It's too bad because I was killing it with my EIQ and cost goal setting this year....sigh)

The way I see it is that cost is still an important metric, if it wasn't I could use the most expensive and effective products all the time. I can't do that (and wouldn't even if I had the budget) so I still want to keep costs as low as possible. If I introduce a new product such as phosphite or silica or mineral oil, it should be cost neutral or vastly better for the environment. I am definitely willing to take one in the pocket book for the environment to a point.

I also think that not using pesticides is better than using them if you have the option. This is why I still stand behind my philosophy of not using preventative applications because this makes it almost impossible to reduce pesticide use unless they come out with more effective, cheaper and less toxic products. In the end, nothing can costs less, provide good playing conditions, and has no toxicity. We can get by with acceptable playing conditions without the need for pesticides everywhere on our course except for the putting greens.

Propiconazole works, untreated
dollar spot on the right!
It's a balancing act (that I really enjoy) to maximize turf quality, minimize costs and hopefully reduce the impacts that pesticides can have (if any) on the environment. Case in point, this year I applied a fungicide on February 20. I did not need another broadcast traditional fungicide, despite having multiple disease outbreaks and difficult growing conditions, until the 4th of September. I could have easily applied 3 or 4 other pesticide applications in that time if I was applying them preventative or even if I was applying them at first sign of a disease. I was looking at active dollar spot for 3 months before a broadcast fungicide application was needed. With the use of phosphite and possibly silica I was able to boost the plant's defenses which allowed me to use cultural practices to keep the disease at acceptable levels until I eventually lost the very long battle.

Tees got hammered with dollar spot, but
we never apply pesticides on tees and can keep
damage to a minimum with fertilizer
 and cultural practices
In the end I applied less pesticide which cost less, had less impact than preventatives and I got full control of the disease with the lowest legal rate I could apply.

So now I have to go back through the million posts where I talk about EIQ and insert a disclaimer link.

In the end I learned that quantifying pesticide risk is a complicated thing to do and I plan to keep looking at ways to improve my decision making process to reduce the possibility of any negative impacts that the pesticides we do use will have on the environment.

Diseasey as hell but no one cares