06/11/2022
If you like a healthy lawn, please read. We have had a lot of rain and there has been no reason to water. We are coming into a week of forecasted hot temps. Fungus is temperature instigated. When our night time temps stay 70 or warmer we start to see fungus. a lot of fungus is directly related to home owner management. Here are some tips to help with fungus.
1. Let your grass dry out completely between watering. Do not water on a set cycle unless you are going to out of town. Let your grass dry out until you can see some stress in your grass. A good time to look for stress is at the hottest time of the afternoon. If it is looking stressed, set your sprinkler to come on the following morning. (We'll talk about length of time a bit later.) After your sprinkler finishes, shut it off until you observe stress to your grass again and repeat. The goal is to have several days between watering. This will force your grass roots to grow down for water and it will need less water over time.
2. Never water in the afternoon or evening. Try to complete all your watering early in the morning and have it finished by 2:00 in the afternoon. This will allow your grass to dry out by the time evening comes and there is dew.
3. Now for length of time. This is hard to say. Rotor heads are the ones that go back and forth. They put on roughly .3 to .4" per hr. Less than most people expect. It would be preferable if you would set your rotor zones to run for at least an HR when you water. Longer if possible. BUT, you do NOT want water runoff. That is also a waste. So the trick is to water as long as possible without runoff. Another method to help with that is to set your sprinklers to water for 1/2 of the preferred total time. Set a second start time on your sprinkler so that after it finishes a program, it will start over and do it a second time. Your soil will have time to soak in the first round before your sprinkler starts over for the second time and you will reduce runoff significantly. This also helps a lot if we have a breeze at night because 2 runtimes will lessen the chance of wind affecting your sprinklers on both cycles.
4. If you annually have a fungus problem, picking up your clippings instead of mulching during the high fungus risk time will help.
If you would like a fungicide application sprayed on your lawn, let me know. Fungicide can be sprayed as a preventative. It only lasts for 28 days and the warm temps can last for much longer than that so it can get quite costly to try to prevent it with fungicides.
