Battling Poa

As promised, here's the update on the next hot-button topic here at Winchester: Poa annua (also know as Annual Bluegrass), and what to do about it. As I'm sure many people know, this battle is raging on golf courses across the US. And few, if any, have been largely successful at taking down the enemy. In fact, many have simply chosen to embrace it, and nurture Poa to become a decent, sometimes excellent, playing surface on it's own.

However, we still have enough of the originally intended grass for our putting surfaces, bentgrass, that it makes the fight still worth fighting. Bentgrass is optimal not merely as a more consistent, smoother putting surface, but also from a management standpoint, as it tends to need less water, less fertilization, and is susceptible to fewer diseases (in this part of the country) than Poa. So the war battles on....

A key part of our Poa management strategy is chemical control through growth regulation. We use two plant growth regulators (Trimmit and Primo) to help us give the bentgrass a competitive edge over the Poa. So far this year, we've made two applications of this mix, and you can begin to see some mild results already:

#18 Green: A very obvious visual - the Poa really stands out here, partly from the production of seedheads (which come out in a flush as the plant gets stressed, and cause alot of bumpiness that golfers really don't enjoy) as well as the yellowing and browning cause by the growth regulator itself.

Here's a bit closer showing the selectivity of the growth regulators: healthy bentgrass surrounding a really stressed out and stunted patch of Poa.

And even closer....this is what we're looking for. The lighter green, short blades with attached brownish seedheads is the Poa, stunted and tight. But the longer, greener blades of bentgrass are poking through. So even as the Poa may not completely die out, we hope to see this bentgrass continue to growth, thrive and push through and over the Poa to choke it out and leave us only with our most desired grass.

This is definitely not a process that occurs overnight. It's a long and difficult road. But combined with other management practices that favor bentgrass over Poa, we hope to beat back the current population and attempt to revert the greens to bentgrass, to the best of our ability. Stay tuned for other ways that we manage to give bentgrass the competitive edge in future posts. And for the last hot-button topic: bluebird boxes and Audubon!