Recently you may have noticed large splotches of brown in the fairways and some of the rough. This grass is Poa Trivialis or roughstalk Bluegrass. This weak low lying turfgrass is found in our weakest areas and invades usually in the cool fall period and over the winter.
When we had the unusually wet May and we were trying to mow grass whenever possible we used a plant growth regulator (PGR) to trim back the growth of fairways and rough. The use in fairways is normal, but this year we tried using the PGR in the roughs.
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| Rough and fairway grass on 6 |
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| Fairway on 18 |
This grass is best suited to low wet and high traffic areas. Normally we see this grass start to stress out when the weather gets hot. In this case we used a generic substitute with the same active ingredient and strength, but the inerts were different. What happened, we are not sure, but it did affect the poa trivialis universally across the course. Interesting that both bent grass and poa annua were not affected. We know in some cases the generics have adverse effects, but in trying to shave costs when using a product across more acerage than normal we seemed to have caused a problem that we don't know how to correct.
Our hope is that it is discolored and will bounce back but as with most things in nature we are waiting to see what effects remain.
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