climate-controlled greenhouse at the G.C.Horn turf field laboratory at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Floratam St.Augustinegrass is being compared with a mix of ornamentals including canna, nandina, ligustrum and allamanda. Plant material is growing in 80-gallon plastic pots in an Arredondo fine sand. There are three fertilizer treatments (16-4-8 quick-release, 15-0-15 quick-release,...

Printed on recycled paper SUMMER 2001 24 A Healthy Ecosystem Inconsistent performance of biological control strategies for turfgrass disease control has limited the adoption of this technology into IPM programs. A major contributing factor to this variable performance in agricultural systems is the cultivar to which biological control organisms are applied. In a recent study, our goal was to de...

T urfgrass managers are always trying to leverage acceptable conditions with minimal inputs (water, nutrients, and pesticides). Maintaining optimal plant nutrition is the foundation of sustaining healthy turfgrasses that require fewer inputs. Liebig’s Law of the Minimum states that plant growth is controlled not by the total amount of resources (nutrients) available, but by the most scarce reso...

Potential resistance to the twolined spittlebug, Prosapia bicincta (Say), was evaluated among 56 turfgrass genotypes. Greenhouse, laboratory, and field bioassays identified differences in spittlebug survival and development, host preference and damage levels, and turfgrass tolerance to and ability to recover from pest induced injury. All centipede grasses demonstrated high levels of susceptibil...

Evaluating ‘Champion’ Bermudagrass in the Field with Various Rates of Nitrogen, Trinexapac-ethyl (Primo), and a Granular Thatch Reducer (Thatch-X) Golf course putting green grasses normally receive stresses from increased traffic, low heights of cut, high potentials to pests due to weakened resistance, and frequent removal of clippings by losing viable food sources. Additionally, in the transit...

Root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne spp.) are the most common and destructive plant-parasitic nematode group worldwide and adversely influence both crop quality and yield. In this study, a total of 51 root-knot nematode populations from turfgrasses were tested, of which 44 were from North Carolina, 6 from South Carolina and 1 from Virginia. Molecular characterisation was performed on these samples...

The severity of damage to host plants by omnivorous pests can vary according to the availability of plant and animal prey. Two omnivorous mole crickets, Scapteriscus vicinus Scudder and S. borellii Giglio-Tos, were used to determine if the availability of prey influences damage to hybrid bermudagrass by adult mole crickets. Experiments were conducted in arenas with either grass alone (control)...