As we push past Mid August it’s time to start monitoring Cranefly hatches. Using PestTracker we got some great information about the Spring Cranefly hatch and we begun to see the value of this data gathering exercise to help us give the Turf industry really good advice. PestTracker has had slow trickle of Cranefly sightings…
Author: Glenn Kirby
Cranefly swarms. But when?
If you’d asked me two years ago when I saw the annual swarm of Cranefly I’d have said “August”. Ask me that same question now and I’ll give you a much longer, complex (and probably much duller) answer than that! Talking to many Turf Managers, I think as an industry we’re a little caught up…
Record temperatures – Impact on soil temps?
I noted with interest the histeria on Twitter as people got very excited about “record breaking” temperatures in the last week or so. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking breaking weather records is probably not a good thing and I certainly don’t view it as a positive. The above video shows how our climate…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…