Spring is here..kind of

This week marked the first of spring, but it sure doesn't feel like it. With expected snow and freezing rain we have held off on course clean up until next week. The golf course has wintered relatively well considering the extreme winter that the London area experienced. All of the snow has melted with the exception of some in the bunkers and very low lying areas. The turf looks good in the treated areas for the most part. The fungicide that we have traditionally used for snow mould protection on fairways (Quintozene) has been removed from the market by the regulatory agencies of Canada (PMRA). With this on the horizon, we decided to use a couple of different products in order to make a more educated decision for our next winter protection applications. The newer products are of a more precise and advanced technology. These products are a blend of fungicides that have multiple modes of action. This means that they are protecting the turf grass in multiple ways. The advantage to this technology is that if one mode of action fails under certain environmental conditions, protection is still there in other forms. This proved to be very effective here at Highland this winter. The fairways that we used the old technology on have a moderate amount of snow mould damage on them. The fairways that the new technology was applied to are in considerably better shape with minimal to no disease infection.