In November and December 2015, temperatures remained high at Palmer Legends Country Club in The Villages, Fla. As a result, the course’s nettlesome nematodes, which melt away grass and leave bare spots in their wake, never really left.
 |
One of the crew usually heads out to the greens with a Toro sprayer in March, April or May, to manage the roundworms with Avid, a Syngenta product. However, superintendent Travis Anderson had to make a change last year. The crew member can only spray a series of three applications of Avid, each 14 days apart from one another, once a year, so Anderson opted to have him do it in the late autumn and early winter of 2015.
“Once the temperatures start going up, that’s when the nematodes start getting active again,” Anderson says. “But now we’re kind of having to second-guess and play weatherman, and we’re almost guessing when the best time to spray it is.”
Avid doesn’t provide year-round control at Palmer Legends, but Anderson can’t argue with its effectiveness against the nematodes. “Without the Avid we would be in trouble,” he says. “We would be doing a lot more plugging, a lot more sodding, on greens. We would be fighting the same spots constantly throughout the year.”
The crew member uses 57 ounces of the product per acre of turf, mixed in with a wetting agent to ease its entry into the soil and to keep it in the right layer, Anderson says.
 |
Originally available outside of the golf course industry, Avid later came into the market in states outside of Florida and then was approved in the Sunshine State, Anderson says. “We had been reading about it in trade magazines and hearing about it — ‘this product works’ — but down here in Florida we couldn’t use it,” he says. “Before Avid, there wasn’t really a whole lot of products that worked, at least in my opinion.”
The aquifer is not as deep in Florida as in other states, and regulations on chemical use is stricter than in other states, Anderson says. “They don’t want it to get down to the soil at a heavy rate because you have to be careful around ponds for sure, and water, with that product,” he says. “There’s buffer zones around bodies of water, ponds, lakes, that we have to follow.”
Other common measures to combat nematode damage, such as plugging and sodding, have been avoided at Palmer Legends when possible, Anderson says. “As far as man hours, it’s probably one of the most time-consuming things ever, is to go out and have to plug a green, because it’s such tedious work, and it typically takes one of your best guys,” he says.
For now, though, Anderson says his course’s putting greens are healthy and golfers are satisfied.
About the author
Patrick Williams is a GCI contributing editor. You can reach him at pwilliams@gie.net.
