Turf management is … STRESSFUL!

Hi, Daniel Lightfoot here. I hope Glenn doesn’t mind me gatecrashing his great blog, but I’ve been out on a few different sites this week and just thought it was worth chucking my two pennyworth out there 🙂 There was a post the other day of Facebook saying something like “… hands up that, if…

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Categorized as Turf Care

Turf Management during a heatwave

Once again sure signs, climatic change is upon us, record temperatures threatened this week with forecasts showing mid to high 30’s. When the air temperature is high we often overlook canopy temperatures during these periods and how much higher they can get than the air temperatures. The Greencast weather tool does a pretty accurate job…

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Categorized as Weather

Application Advice – Acelepryn Insecticide

I’ve spent the last couple of days at Goring and Streatley golf club filming for a piece we’re putting together about application techniques. (watch this space – I may get my first BAFTA for this one!) It was great to spend a couple of days on a golf course (although my rose tinted spectacles were…

Junes Rain Impact on River Flows – Turf Stress

Last time I put a blog out about how dry the weather had been, it was immediately followed by one of the wettest weeks we’ve ever seen in June. As we approach the point of the summer when potentially the most stress is imparted on your turf surfaces, I thought I’d try and summon up…

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Categorized as Weather

Chafers – A slow shift to Northern hatching?

You’ll remember that most sightings of our winged friends, chafer grubs have been around the South of England, as the heat map below shows. This week we have had a few sightings of Welsh Chafer logged on the Syngenta PestTracker around the Colchester and Cambridge area. This isn’t a significant shift in area but could…

Light intensity, sunshine and day length – the numbers

To follow on from my last blog on light intensity you can see an interesting picture forming below. The below pictures show varying degrees of sunshine, intensity and day lengths. All the figures are for Sandwich Down on the south east coast where I usually find the highest sun intensity figures. All the map images…

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Categorized as Light

Light levels 2018 vs 2019 – Turf Management

Below are two graphs show light levels for all of 2018 and light levels so far in 2019. If you’ve read my last two blogs you’ll have a pretty good idea what’s going on and you can skip to the next section – if not here goes the simple version: The green lines are good,…

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Categorized as Light

I’ve seen the light – Impact on Turf

As we are now in the period of the longest days of the year it’s worth revisiting light and how it impacts the plant. Photosynthetically useful light is measured in Micromoles per square meter per second (µmoles/m2/s). This is a unit of the intensity of the light and can range in the UK from 0…

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Categorized as Light