Need some opinions on turfgrass complaint

[Mark Oomkes]

I received these pics from a customer today, let me know what you think happened, then I will provide some more info.

[Mark Oomkes]

Is there a way to post more than 1 pic in a post?

Here's another:

[Mark Oomkes]

and another:

[Mark Oomkes]

I have more, but this will be the last one for now.

[dan deutekom]

Isee some tire marks. From these pictures this looks like a bad case of chemical burning from fertilizer or weed spray

[BSD]

looks like fert burn to me.

[Mark Oomkes]

No weed spray, 2 different formulations of fertilizer, 2 different applicators. 1 very experienced, 1 rookie.

Fertilizer is all slow realease, in fact, the worst areas had Nature Safe 15-3-8 applied, which I have yet to see any fert burn so far at all from. Not even sure if it is possible.

No other opinions?

[Stonehenge]

Judging by the green turf where the tree casts it's shadow, I'd say you got some of the same heat we got, and the irrigation system wasn't turned on to water it - so the turf went dormant anywhere there was a bit of stress (tire marks) or direct sunlight all day.

That's my guess.

[Mark Oomkes]

Yes, we have had a lot of heat, low humidity and a short term becoming a long term drought as of late.

Personally, I think you're on to something Jeff.

[Nebraska]

It's lack of water.

Have them soak it like new sod every three days and it will come back.

[Forge]

Looks like summer dormancy to me.

[TrickyDick]

That was my frist thought as well. The obvious tire marks could be a sign that you have a lot of compaction there too which would cause the whole thing to happen faster. Aerating wouldn't hurt in addition to watering heavily.

[PSUscaper]

Looks like lack of water to me. I've had sod go brown like that, but it came back.......slowly. Water the hek out of it, but with the heat wave we had, it doesn't seem to be able to water enough. Trying to get seed to germinate has been impossible for the past few weeks. Hopefully this cool spell were having here will get things caught up a little

[dan deutekom]

I am sure the dry period has a lot to do with it but I still say that the fertilizer is the root cause. A lawn will burn much easier from fertilizer if it is already stressed from heat and drought or it will also burn more from dryness if there are high applications of fertilizer stressing it. Those tire tracks are a sure sign of stressed grass.

Also looking at the burning you can almost see where the fertilizer has been spread heavily from turning at the end of a run with the spreader still on and in places where the applicator has gone over the same area several times to avoid obstacles

[NCSULandscaper]

if you look in the 3rd picture where that sprinkler is going in the background it doesnt look that bad, i would say that its dry and going into dormancy or dying

[Dale Wiley]

The tire tracks indicate that a utility vehicle was driven off the paved area on to the grass. The tires absorb a lot of heat and then burn the grass. I actually think the vehicle sat on the paved area and then was driven given the skip marks on the grass.

I suspect poor infiltration of wager, and possible standing water during a very hot period, the water stands on the grass , heats up and basically scalds the grass. That is shown by there being no clear defination or delination of the damaged areas, but entire areas with no clear boundaires outside of the over heated tires.

The grass was fairly lush / flush from fertilizer and not hardend off for the heat.

Just sayin...:rolleyes:

[agla]

I once saw an area where irrigation washed casaron out of planting beds and across a lawn. The result lookeds similar, but only followed the direction of water as it moved over the lawn.

I'm no turf expert, but when I have seen turf burned from too much fert, I don't recall seeing burned and then even green color on what is not.

?Is there any chance of this being grub damage. It looks like it is all in sunny areas.

[Mark Oomkes]

Thanks for the many and varied repsonses. I will take a look at it today, along with one of my vendors for an 'objective' opinion. I am fairly confident I know what the cause is, but I need to take a look at it first hand as well as get some more info from the client regarding irrigation.

Dale, partially correct, however the fertilizer had not even started working yet, so the growth not being hardened off is not the issue.

I'll give the whole story later on today. As well as links for the fertilizer we used.

[Mark Oomkes]

OK, here's the story.

We mowed this client on June 12, fertilized on June 13. It was hot and dry that week and has been since. Only about a 1/10" of rain if even that. Fert used in 99% of the pictures was the Nature Safe 15-2-8, here's the spec sheet for it: http://www.naturesafe.com/content/pr...15-2-8spec.pdf Virtually impossible to burn turf with it. Nature Safe's reply was to take a handful and throw it on the turf to show that it won't burn--no, I didn't do that. I did take my vendor's sales rep with me for that 'objective' opinion. This client needs to be hand-held through these processes as he knows enough to be dangerous. (long, long story; same guy that wanted to know what kind of sand to use as traction control in the winter) My rep knows this as he has dealt with him directly on some things as well.

No evidence of any insect problems was seen. There is some evidence of dollar spot beginning and possibly some necrotic ring spot. Not even red thread. THere is a whole bunch of :censored: soil conditions over this entire place.

You can see in some of the areas that it is worse than others, but all areas are already starting to regrow-new blades coming out of the crown. There's one proof for no fert burn. Another is no particles of fert sitting on the ground in brown areas. Another is the diurnal banding--horizontal yellow streaks in the grass blades that show the blade of grass was cracked while under stress--drought stress in this case. No doubt that it was under stress when the mowing occurred, but as seen in the pics, how do you mow only the green parts when they're scattered all over? Or I get complaints about long grass\areas not mowed, pretty much a Catch 22 for me. I would have mowed it under the assumption irrigation is occurring.

SO there you have it, I would have assumed that regular irrigation is occurring. You know what happens when someone assumes, right?

Well, it does come out that there was an irrigation problem over a weekend and that irrigation may not have occurred for a period of 3 days. We get all done with our walkaround looking at many other areas (there was some obvious fert burn in a couple other locations, absolutely no denying and we will fix that ASAP) and the rep and I are leaving when the guy in charge of irrigation happens by. (I have some issues with this guy as he is a former employee that was a month away from getting 'laid off' by me when he handed in his 2 week notice, for which I am eternally thankful.) So we talk to him for awhile. He thinks it's fert burn, I tell him it was impossible. He then goes into "Well, we did have some controller issues for a 2-3 day period." IN the process of talking with him--I let the rep do it, he's smarter than me--we find out that it was at least a 4-6 day period with no irrigation and\or if it was working the pump was not putting out the volume it was supposed to. When it comes down to it, he has no idea how long the irrigation was not operating properly because the system they are using (Toro Sentinel) only tells the operator that the valve opened and closed, but does not tell him that it actually happened or if there is a leak, head out, etc. He tells us that he was receiving phantom times--the program was showing it operating but it wasn't. Throw that in with the pump only producing 150 GPM vs. 180 GPM minimum and we're off the hook for fert burn, as I suspected all along. But I did have to rule that out and everything else.

Congratulations to Stonehenge, Nebraska, Forge, TrickyDick, PSUscaper, NCSULandscaper, and partials to Dale and agla.

I've seen the same thing with Casoron, agla. Not a good thing.

Solution: We're going to paint it because it is very high visibility and we will be removing the sod\soil and resodding where actual burn occurred and I will be giving an employee a swift kick in the ass for burning the other areas.

Thanks for everyone's help and opinions. I hope and pray to not have to do this again anytime soon. Didn't make for a very nice weekend even though I was 90% sure of what the problem was.

[Stonehenge]

An ancillary note - I was in South Bend, Indiana over the weekend, and a very large portion of the turf, everywhere, looked just like that. South Bend can't be more than 2 hours south of G.R.

Hope all turns out well.

[Mark Oomkes]

Jeff, that's what really torques me, the turf is going dormant and in some situations is dormant all over the place already and immediately when it happens it was pass the buck, nobody wanted to take responsibility for it. I think I need to come up with a diplomatic way of telling him that it was his employee that was not willing to accept responsibility and instead tried to lay blame on us.

Especially me. ;)

[cutntrim]

We've had 10 days over 30C temps already, today will be 11...compared with only 6 days all last year. We've had less than half the normal rainfall total as well. Grass is burned out everywhere. People are hot, tempers are short. I'm glad I've got post-dated cheques for residential maintenance contracts because I wouldn't want to have to "justify" an invoice when all we can do right now is spot-cut, trim a little and do some hand weeding.

[GLAN]

It's pretty obvious it was a watering problem......Although there are many chinch bug and army worm damage pictures that look just like those posted