Experimenting with Tenacity



You may have noticed a few of our bunker faces have suddenly developed spots of white, bleached out looking grass.  Once again, this is something that has occurred intentionally through our own doing.  We have been experimenting with a  new product called Tenacity, a selective herbicide on a handful of bunker faces  in an attempt to eliminate a weedy grass called velvet grass (Holcus genus).  This weedy grass is coarse, ugly and does not blend well with our finer textured turf.  It has been difficult to control over the years due to the limited number of selective weed control product options for this particular type without harming the desirable turf around it.   As a result, the population has multiplied quite a bit over the years and can be found on many of our bunker faces and certain areas of our roughs.   

We obtained a small sample of Tenacity from our chemical rep to play with and applied it about two weeks ago with a backpack sprayer on some of our worst bunker faces (behind #6 green and #12 green) to see what it would do.  It is kind of cool the way the product works as you can see in the pictures.  My product literature from Sygenta explains how it works as follows:

"Tenacity is a new turf herbicide with a novel mode of action based on a naturally produced compound from the bottlebrush plant which prevents formation of carotenoids in susceptible plant species.  Without carotenoids, light energy and by-products of photosynthesis destroy cholorophyll and cell membranes resulting in bleaching of leaves, followed by necrosis and death of the plant."

Our plan is to continue to monitor the results, learn from what we see, figure out what type of over seeding we need to do if any and make an educated decision on if and how we may formulate a plan using this product for the golf course moving forward.  This type of work will likely need to be done in the spring or fall to get the response/recovery that we need to be successful.  Either way,  so far this product looks like it is pretty cool and I am looking forward to figuring out the best way to possibly incorporate this into our agronomy plan for next season.