Archive for January, 2012

I love early morning meetings. 7:30 AM and we get hit with words like Systemic Acquired Resistance and Activator Triggers. It’s a warm yummy feeling, like maple syrup over bacon and waffles and I couldn’t be more happy to be in the front row. Yum Yum Yum. Pass the Pathology, please!! Especially when we are talking about natural plant defenses.

To be smart and fair, I should digress a moment as to last night’s activities.  Every year our annual meeting includes a dinner. We turn the 130 or so folks loose on a buffet, open several cases of Naumann Merlot and the Orc Feast begins. And when the Merlot and the Turfhead Orcs are melded into one, we take some poor industry notable, give them a microphone and ask them to talk. Some call this a Keynote Speech. I call it Speaker Survival.

Last year, the Orc Feast was Keynoted by none other then our own Maestro McCormick. He did a pretty good job at first by showing pictures of what he thought I looked like in the early online days. Something akin to Santa Claus meets Guy at Bus Stop. Funny. He had the crowd. Then he said something about job loss and the Orcs, had they not eaten the food, would have thrown it. However, they proclaimed The Maestro Turfhead worthy.

This year, our Keynote Victim was supposed to be Jon Scott, Chief of Agronomy for Nicklaus. But some crazy crap about some big contract to build some golf course for something called The Olympics meant that Mr. Scott was required to be on Air Bear and not with us. So…I did what I could and after my Crazy Train Collecting Neighbor declined the invitation I did what any good turfhead would do and reached out to Pat Jones.

Mr. Jones showed up. And he just rocked. The Orcs, lubed by MerlotGrog didn’t take it easy on him and he did fine. No food thrown. Plenty of good opinions. No Blood. No crashed Cruise Ships. Good deal.

But I digress….

Right now, Dr. Clarke is talking about natural disease suppression and that’s a good thing. A really good thing. And I’m thinking…Finally….the chemical companies may actually get pathologists (and TurfOrcs) to think about biology as real and useful.

Imagine such a world. It’s easy if you try.

I can’t find a decent picture anywhere of Joel Simmons and it’s too dark to take a good picture, so this will have to do. 

Joel is on a mission. He’s good at it and he’s taken way to much crap for understanding and going all in for a great thing. He’s saying things like “Give Me Humus or Give Me Death” and if you’ve followed anything that I’ve done or said over the years, you know that I believe in this and I live it as well. Joel and I have put our work into play at some pretty cool places and what we talk about and do works. It’s not pipe dreams or entertainment or just a way to sell stuff (oh by the way, neither of us has a Cushy University Deal, so RESULTS have had to count).

So once again, Joel is here, working and talking about Carbon Based Fertility. The Gloves are a little off. Here is something good to read from Joel as to why he is speaking up. And I don’t blame him because those of us in the field have kind of had it with being told that the things we are doing that are working aren’t working. Absurd. Really absurd. And it is such an affront to so many Supers who have worked miracles by looking at things a different way.

I’m stoked to hear Joel speak. I’ve heard it before and I’ll hear it again. I live it. So do my “A” players. That oughta be enough. But because a buch of the AOG thinks they know better because they just wanna be different…it’s not going to be.

I can’t hold it against him. Dr. Wong wanted to be with his wife in the DC area and well let’s face it, The University of California system is pretty much on life support. So now, Dr. Wong takes up residence in the DC area and he finds himself working with Bayer Environmental Sciences. Guess what? Good fit. Good for us all. I love Dr. Wong. He’s an amazing guy and whatever he is doing he is going to

be great at it. Really great.

So today Dr. Wong is doing his job and talking about Bayer products and Stress-Gard formulations and how the plant physiology works in the role of radiation management. I think we are going to hear a lot about pigments and radiation management. We are definitely seeing a lot of folks bring this “green” technology to the marketplace. Bayer is ahead of the game right now and it’s going to pay for a lot of us to look at this technology and listen carefully to the words of wisdom of Wong and those that are looking at this work. It’s a good thing.

I‘m in. I’ve seen it working in the field and in a lot of cases, the 10% or so better makes a huge difference in overall job health…er….Turf Health.

It’s clear that Dr. Fred isn’t from around here. The accent is like smooth Carolina sweet tea. But the only Tea he’s talking about today has to do with Plant Growth Regulators.

(sorry Dr. Fred. No picture here….we’ve got the room to dark and I don’t wanna be beaten down by using my flash…plus the iphone flash is like…well…a phone flash)

Dr. Fred is working with a lot of PGR timing. And it’s clear that one of the things I’ve been saying about timing is key. Check out this past Zealot Post. Dr. Yelverton is also clearly pointing out the variances in rate having to do with turf type and height of cut. He also has some very good data that says that when you go off the product long enough the “Rebound Effect” is clear and happens and is very real. Point? Go off the material and expect a rebound. So the whole “I can’t sleep because it is summer and I got all superstitious so I quit spraying my PGR” can be a very bad thing.

And going out and making one app is just putting your head in the noose.

Dr. Bruce Clarke of Rutgers talks about Fairy Ring and Pink Snow Mold. Big take away is that Bayleton very effective on Fairy Ring. Products applied before symptoms make for good control as long as soil temps are low (50-60 degrees F). Two apps 21 days apart as long as you are at those soil temps and then water in those apps with .25 inches.

I’m excited. I haven’t slept in a couple days. My biggest event of the year is finally here. Months of organizing coming down to my printing name tags early this morning and driving the hour and a half to our venue, the amazing Cache Creek Casino and Resort and their fantastic golf course, Yocha-De-He. I’m sure this means Monkey Creek in some Native American language. Or not. There’s a pool and a pond. The pond is best for me, I think.

Dr. Bruce Clarke from Rutgers is first up for education. Talking about Fairy Ring and Pink Snow Mold. The games begin and I’ll be posting any highlights if I can do so and finish my talk which is supposed to happen in a few hours. I don’t really have it done yet. I’ve started and stopped a few times.

In most of my travels where water is an issue or drought is ruling or where reclaimed is the coming possibility, we have to deal with management of salts. So that can be the #1 driving force in deciding to flush to rid us of conductivity.

The second thing is that a majority of the modern courses built in the last many years have a form or another of a perched water table-oriented sand-based system. And that is it’s own animal, requiring some technique in water application to infuse air into the rootzone.

Lastly, with topdressing seen as a best practice over (again) the last many years, we see greens that have their own layered version of a drainage free water table perch. And that requires some thinking as well.

Since I’ve been (mostly) a Western US Turfhead, we have tended to talk about this a lot. As a young super in Denver, having just put in one of the first Maxi systems and starting to water with ET, I didn’t know that my deep wells were of pretty poor quality. But I did know that light frequent apps of water oriented toward ET weren’t giving me the playing conditions I wanted. It was right about then that I heard that Ed Miller, who once was in CO and was then in AZ had written an article for the Green Section Record. Here it is: Ed Miller Article. I hope you read it and read it again.

It’s not a new thing. It’s not rocket science. It does fly in the face of how some of the modern software works, but we get around that.

Reading this and adopting this method on my push up Poa greens and even on the rest of my golf course as we began a much more aggressive aerification method turned a lot of things around for me. So I’ve stuck with that, both as a Super at two other positions and over a bunch of years of consulting. It’s not a new thing. It’s not rocket science. It does fly in the face of how some of the modern software works, but we get around that.

The flush is still important and I think over the last 5-7 years, water quality hasn’t gotten better and air always needs to be exchanged in the rootzone. So a real honest to goodness Irrigation Sneeze is really important. When that is coupled with some common sense about how Evaporative Cooling really works and how water moves and how salts accumulate, you have to think that perhaps a change is needed when the usual method isn’t working.

After all, the true definition of agronomic insanity is when you keep doing the same thing and the same bad stuff keeps happening…

After all, the true definition of agronomic insanity is when you keep doing the same thing and the same bad stuff keeps happening. As turfheads, we tend to want to change a lot of things, but foundational comforts like watering tend to be more more holy and less prone to some critical examination.

Over the years, I’ve helped a lot of people out with this technique and have come to believe it has a reasonable place in a majority of situations. I’ve seen it give us some problems when irrigation systems have poor DU, poor control and when weather demands some respect for already humid conditions. We have control over a couple of those areas and the other one is cyclic. Popping off a big cycle in 90/90 weather is the kind of thing we don’t really want to be doing. But for the life of me, I can’t understand why the water goes on every night in 70/30 weather. Can’t.