Poa Cure Trials Updated

Update Thursday Oct 19:

We sprayed the back half of 7 green, all of 8 green, and all of the chipping green.  We will do this twice more on two week intervals.  

In the spring we hosted Dr. Jordan Booth from the USGA and got his insight into how we might stretch out the useful life of our putting greens.  They are on the upper end of the 15-30 year lifespan typical of a putting green.  One problem we are constantly working on is organic matter accumulation which we will devote to another article soon.  Another problem is an increasing poa annua (annual bluegrass) population that is causing a challenge to playability and maintenance.  It's population varies from as little as 5% to more than 70% on any given green.  Complete renovation is out of the question right now, so we are doing all we can to get a few more years out of what we have.  

Poa annua is a topic of conversation throughout the spring and early summer and it gets louder every year.  Poa Cure is a product that has been available for several years and we tried it this spring.  When Jordan visited we had just completed the first of three applications on the back half of the 1st green.  His visit report recommended starting with fall treatments rather than spring, so we backed off our trial and decided we'd start this fall.  We plan to make 3 trial applications of poa cure starting tomorrow.  We will repeat in two weeks and then again a month from now.  When next March rolls around we expect that some will wish we hadn't done this trial.  However, we are hopeful that with a few weeks of good growing weather next spring, the bentgrass will start to fill in the voids that would otherwise be a bumper crop of poa annua seed.  By late summer we'll be able to judge the trial and make plans accordingly.  

The protocol for poa cure typically consists of both spring and fall applications.  Our variety of bentgrass is called Southshore and is considered "old" by industry standards.  There is no data specific to poa cure on 30 year old Southshore so we are going to try it on a limited basis before we jump in with both feet.  

The first 3 minutes of the following video with Dr Askew from Virginia Tech and Dr. Rossi from Cornell gives good info on what we might expect to see in our trial starting with the fall treatment plan.