Weed Control

With the recent warm weather not only are the rounds of golf up but so are the winter weeds. We have been actively going after them the last several weeks with post emergent control. We did apply our fall pre-emergent, however, sometimes you will get a few seeds to still germinate.

I included some pictures below that some of you may recognize. One is of a herbicide application tool that is a stick we can fill with whatever we need at the time to "dob" weeds with the circumference of about a nickel. The other picture is of where we have used this tool on the course. These areas can be found around the greens. This is because we use a nonselective herbicide around the greens. Most selective herbicides, which remove cool season grasses from warm season grasses, have a tendency to move and could run out onto the greens where they would also kill the greens. Therefore, we use this technique around the greens.

One more item I would like to discuss about the use of the herbicides is the amount of time that we need to wait to actually see them working. Most selective herbicides inhibit some growth function in the plant which then causes the plant to die. Therefore, these products need to be metabolized in the plant and then given time to perform their function. Given the fluctuation of cool weather and warm weather throughout the winter months here in Texas, we sometimes need to wait for the material to be completely metabolized into the plant. This can take up to several weeks depending on the weather.