Everyone wants a beautiful, lush looking landscape – whether it’s your lawn, landscape, or trees. Unfortunately, pests and diseases can enter an area and start to cause problems. I’m going to focus on diseases and how they enter an area and start to infect your landscape.
Plant diseases fall into a few main categories; bacteria, virus, and fungus. While viruses and bacteria are a problem, the majority of diseases we run into in Minnesota are fungi.
Hundreds of varieties of diseases exist, but it’s the environment around you that makes an area conducive for disease development.
Mycelium: fungal spores developing & multiplying
Disease development requires three things to start forming. A pathogen, a host, and the environment all have to be in the right place at the right time for any disease to start germinating. This is referred to as the Disease Triangle.
An example of this would be a common turf fungus, Brown Patch. We already know the pathogen, Brown Patch. Located in Minnesota, all of our grasses can be the host since all cool season grasses are subject to this disease. The environment is in the middle of the summer when temperatures are warm over night mixed with high humidity during the day. Also, how wet and saturated the soil is plays a part in this. When all three come together at the right time, symptoms will start to appear.
Knowing what each facet of the triangle does also gives you options for control of the pathogen. With Brown Patch, several options can be thought about when trying to eradicate the disease. Most companies would go with a quick fix and apply some fungicide to the infected area when that might not be necessary.
At Barrett Lawn Care we utilize the approach of Integrated Pest Management. This means that all considerations are taken into account to alter the environment or conditions before we consider a chemical application. Wind can dry the grass out, temperatures can change, less irrigation, aeration of turf, and raising the mowing height are all options we can utilize without putting any chemical on the ground.
It is very important to understand the relationship of these three when trying to diagnose and identify the problem. A person can go on for days and days on this topic, but without understanding how to approach the problem, many people will not diagnose diseases correctly.
For further information:
http://www.apsnet.org/edcenter/instcomm/TeachingArticles/Pages/DiseaseTriangle.aspx
https://masters.agron.iastate.edu/classes/514/lesson04b/4b.3.html
