We often forget grass is a living organism. Like us, it gets stressed and sick and we don’t always appreciate the effect they can have on our golf courses.
There are a number lurking, waiting for the right conditions to take hold, before causing huge problems when they strike.
Kelly-Marie Clack is agronomy and technical manager at Origin Amenity Solutions. She is revealing golf’s ‘big four’ turf diseases, what they do and what we need to understand about how they can be treated. This time, a fungus that’s really starting to take hold in the UK: Dollar Spot.
Dollar Spot
What is it?: It’s a fungus. We see it on creeping bent grass, rye, fescue and poa. Increased humidity and prolonged leaf wetness is really increasing this disease activity in the UK. A few years ago, we hadn’t really seen dollar spot past Bristol. Last year we got calls coming from Aberdeenshire.
What does it do to turf?
It starts to appear as small, bleached circles, the size of a US dollar coin, which start to coalesce and become really large pieces of dead turf. But the biggest problem is those spots start to push in, causing your ball to bounce, bobble, snake and go in directions you don’t want. And as it’s seen in the summer, it’s severely affecting your game.
What can be done about it?
We must protect our greens as that’s where we want our best performance. We need to reduce stress and have good fertility, which means they sometimes might not be as quick as we’d like.
We might need to increase our height of cut and apply more wetting agents, bio-stimulants and stress relievers. Water is a really valuable resource, and clubs could future-proof their courses with reservoirs to store rainfall, which has a good PH and is much better for greens than water from boreholes and mains.
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Plant health is going to be really important and applying just the right amount of water.
Summary
This disease is devastating and will spread via golfer’s shoes, the wheels of buggies, trolleys and grass clippings. If it’s on tees, it will spread to fairways, approaches and greens.
In America, it’s one of the worst turf diseases, with some club spending vast sums spraying fungicides every 10 to 15 days. We don’t have that resource and we don’t have the rotation of chemistry.
- This article appears in Your Course, the twice-yearly publication from the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association. Your Course invites golfers to gain a deeper appreciation of what preparing and maintaining a golf course really involves. Head to www.bigga.org.uk to find out more.
Now have your say on Dollar Spot
Have your club had issues with Dollar Spot? How did they deal with it? Let us know by leaving a comment or by getting in touch on X.
