Mark Hunt’s Weather Assessment
26th July – 2nd August 2010
Firstly, thanks to everyone for their rainfall feedback, it would appear Kerry and Central Scotland picked up the most rain with Davy McIndoe measuring 100mm down in Killarney over a 9 day period! In general Scotland, the North West (where they have a hosepipe ban!), Wales, the South West and Central Midlands came out with good levels of rainfall, whereas the South Midlands and the M4 / M25 corridor had the least.
As predicted a couple of weeks ago, we are into a spell of alternating high and low pressure systems which means some fine weather interspersed with rainfall and in general slightly cooler temperatures due a northerly wind direction on some days.
Monday starts off wet in places (like here), but it's not until Tuesday that the next concentrated rain front moves in reaching Ireland in the early morning and affecting a line from Mayo / Sligo across to Wicklow and north of there. These showers move into Wales and the North during the day and head South to give light rainfall in the Midlands and S.East later that day. For the lads in the driest areas, I don't expect this rain will amount to too much, but for everyone it will knock the edge of the daily E.T., so hand-watering duties will be reduced this week in general. These showers will linger during Wednesday, staying dry for Thursday, before another band of rain arrives into North-West Ireland early Friday and this tracks South East across Wales, the Midlands and the S.East, late on Friday to give rain at the end of the week and early Saturday morning for many.
Longer term we have a similar pattern of weather for next week, i.e. a warm latter part of the weekend and start of next week before another low comes down to give some rain and knock off the E.T. demand.
Agronomically, plenty of issues around at the moment with a few early indications of Anthracnose Foliar Blight, particularly on dry, stressed areas like raised ridges of greens. Here the grass has both been under stress and because water availability has been lower, so has nutrient availability (because the plant cannot uptake nutrient without soil moisture), so the bottom line for me over the next month is to maintain consistent nutrient availability to the plant and if necessary, tighten your feed intervals down to every two weeks rather than three-weekly or monthly. The idea here is to maintain a moderate of new shoot growth and in U.S research, a treatment of 5kg of N per hectare per week proved as effective as a fungicide for growing out this disease and certainly it's a lot cheaper.
If you have clear signs of Anthracnose, particularly Foliar Blight (faster form of Anthracnose affecting the foliage first), I would drop out my PGR from the spray mix because you need to maximise, not reduce shoot growth, the same goes for summer Fusarium, creating new growth is key to recovery. If a plant is slow growing, it seems to me that it is alot easier for the disease to move down the foliage and affect the crown of the plant and obviously less disease is removed in the clippings by cutting. The same advice would apply to Red Thread on tees, collars and approaches, drop out the PGR, up the iron rate, tighten the fertiliser frequency and grow the disease out.
Mark Hunt
Technical Director
Headland Amenity Ltd
>Weather Assessment 19th July - 26th July 2010
>Weather Assessment 12th July - 19th July 2010
>Weather Assessment 28th June - 5th July 2010
>Weather Assessment 2nd June - 9th June 2010
>Weather Assessment 4 - 11th Dec 2009
>Weather Assessment/Summary Spring 2009
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