Most of us have recently had the hottest day of the year so far already.
Hopefully for most the mini heatwave hasn’t lasted long enough to impart significant/visible turf stress.
But as we know when it comes to summer turf stress it’s an incremental business with stresses from different sources building up over time.
It can reach a tipping point where the turf becomes more susceptible to disease pressure (primarily anthracnose).
I wrote a blog post on light stress when I first joined Syngenta back in 2022, focusing mainly on what the research tells us about the draw backs of turf undergoing light stress.
You can read that here.
For many, Ryder the Syngenta turf pigment technology is the first line of defence against high light stress this time of year, when we have high levels of light intensity and the longest days.
The more turf managers I’ve spoken to since then the wider the variety of different ways Ryder is deployed to help them achieve their vision.
It’s a very flexible product in that sense.
Whilst all I’ve discussed it with know of the benefits to turf health, many are using it to present surfaces in a certain way year round, be that trying to achieve a consistent colour or enhance definition.
Trial results
In 2021 the STRI ran a turf pot trial on Ryder at the Bingley UK site.
The aim was to try and separate out some of the different turf stresses.
The whole thing is run in growth chambers so you can control the different environmental factors.
Three phases to the trial;
- Normal maintenance conditions (normal irrigation practices)
- Drought phase (irrigation withheld)
- Recovery phase (back to normal irrigation practices)
(I’ve mapped those phases out at the top of the graphs for reference)
Then half of each treatment group (lets call these the lucky pots) get just the exposure to the different drought stresses above. (No extra UV).
The unlucky half go through the same water stress, but also get elevated UVB (ultraviolet light) stress thrown on top also. (EXTRA UV)
Quite harshly, they estimated 2.25 times the UV observed on a sunny cloud free day in Bingley (not that you get many of those in a year).
Ryder is a turf pigment technology, so it’s no surprise to see it’s giving benefits in terms of turf colour score in this trial.
Turf quality was also stronger in the Ryder treatments.
The mini sprayers indicate when the three applications of Ryder at 1L per ha were made.
We get to pick out some nice details about stress here.
In both graphs (for colour and for quality) the orange line is untreated with that extra UV light stress loaded on top.
Its doing fine, inline with other treatments when it’s just the UV stress. It’s towards the bottom of the table for the first phase of the study but not worryingly so.
But you can see when the drought stress comes in it really plunges away, preforming much worst than the other treatments, including the drought stress only untreated group.
The Ryder treatments hold the turf in a better place for longer in terms of colour and quality.
Only in the last phase of the trial does the drought only (no extra UV stress) untreated overtake the UV beaten Ryder treatment.
The key take away for me is it’s great to have data to support what we know and talk about so often, that stresses do not act alone, they can combine and build up in relatively short spaces of time.
Utilise all the tools you have available to manage plant stress throughout the season, because you never know when the next mini heatwave is coming and how long it will last.
Good management practices are essential to deliver high quality playing surfaces, especially when things heat up in the longest days of summer.
Ryder’s pigment technology can be a powerful addition to a program to help combat the effects of light stress.
Find the rate which works for your #TurfGoals, rates from 0.4 to 2 liters are being used, and tweaked, to get the right tone.
