A more progressive style

Today we will be making one of our biweekly fairway spray applications and I felt necessary to explain what we are doing. For many years now, I have been using what some would call, a more progressive style of turfgrass management. This style uses very aggressive BMP (Best Management Practices) and IPM (Integrated Pest Management) programs. Our goal in utilizing these programs is to reduce the overall amount of pesticides and other inputs that are used on the course and to build the plants natural defense mechanisms to levels that the plant is able to fight it's own fight. Now, there are always those occasions especially in this area of the country, when we must utilize the newer safer plant protectants, but we try to keep that to a minimum.

Our fairway spray today is a good example of the above. In today's spray, we are applying a phosphite, Calcium, Nitrogen and a Nitrogen stabilizer. The use of phosphites is relatively new over the last 5 plus years in the industry. Through years of research, it was found that the plant natural produces phosphite or PO3. It was also found that if the level of phosphite in the plant is raised to certain levels, some common diseases we see in this area will no longer infect the plant or if they do, it is at very tolerable levels. By spraying a phosphite, which is not a pesticide, on our turf every two weeks we are naturally raising the plants own defense mechanism to fend off hosts.

The calcium we also apply every 2 weeks. This is the purest form of calcium you can apply to turfgrass which makes it readily available to the plant once it is applied. Calcium is so important in so many ways to a turfgrass plant. By continuing to apply this form of calcium, we are ensuring we will not have deficiencies.

As many of you know, nitrogen is also extremely important for turfgrass. We apply extremely low rates of a foliar nitrogen every 2 weeks. We include what is called a stabilizer so the nitrogen stays available to the plant. The form of nitrogen we use is a liquid urea. Urea is very volatile in the atmosphere. If we were to not add the stabilizer, once the spray landed on the plant, if the uptake of the urea was slow, most of the urea would be lost to a gas in the atmosphere. Utilizing this stabilizer ensures we lose little to none of our application. We also use a stabilizer because urea is a very readily available for of nitrogen to a grass plant. If we did not use a stabilizer, the urea applied would be used up by the plant in a very short period of time. We would see rapid growth of our fairways which is not conducive to golf course conditions. Using the stabilizer allows a small portion of the urea to be released to the plant so we don't have a slush of growth.

Till next time.