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, we’ve got something that’s an active part of the life of soil – but can get out of hand.
Fairy rings
What is it?: We see fairy rings in lots of different places. We’ve got to remember we’re in a living, breathing environment. It’s a living entity with its own ecosystem below the ground – billions and billions of microbes under every surface and the plant is sustaining that life in the soil.
Fairy rings are an active natural part of soil life – a sign of good soil – but on a green, they can affect play.
What does they do to turf?
They can cause excessive growth. We get a greening circle, where the grass within is growing slightly better than the grass around it.
A fairy ring could grow double the size of the grass around it during the course of a day due to microbes in the soil eating away organic material and releasing nitrogen, which brings the excess growth.
The ball will bobble over that surface and affect the roll. We also see fairy rings that dry down, so we get more of a burned-out circle with straw-like grass, which has become repellent of water.
It stops going in, which means the grass can’t survive, and it dessicates.
What can be done about them?
Chemicals available for fairy rings are not as effective as people want them to be. Good moisture management and good soil moisture management is really important.
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This applies to all diseases. It’s managing thatch, or organic matter, so you don’t create the home for them. That needs investment with your greenkeepers to support them to make the right decisions on the golf course.
Summary
Fairy rings keep growing and moving outwards. If you have a small one on your green, it will grow bigger and bigger as time goes on, There are also fruiting bodies, where we start to see mushrooms growing, and we tend to see more of them in the rough or on fairways.
- 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 fairy rings
Have your club had issues with fairy rings? How did they deal with it? Let us know by leaving a comment or by getting in touch on X.
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