CHESTERFIELD, Mo. – St. Louis summers can be rough on our turf. After a stretch of hot weather, things have cooled down and we’re now transitioning to a wet pattern. Local lawn care companies have been fielding more calls about disease recently.
“Probably mid-last week, everybody was enjoying the cooler temperatures but what that brought with us was some more disease that we hadn’t seen for a while,” Craig Calhoun, turf department manager with Ryan Lawn & Tree, said. “Seeing a lot of dollar spot disease on blue grass and as we transition later this week into warmer weather, we’re going to start seeing diseases like brown patch and pythium come back.”
Calhoun said that adding in some moisture this week could make these diseases more prevalent later in the month, especially if rain occurs during the late afternoons and evenings. Rain in the morning is less problematic.
You can spray a fungicide as a preventative to keep it from happening, but for that, you’ll need a dry day. You can also treat it as a curative once you start to see the disease. But the wet pattern we’re expecting this week is positive overall, especially helping lawns without irrigation and, ideally, we’d like to keep seeing rain one to two days a week.
As we head toward the end of August and the start of September it’s time to think about lawn repair and seeding.
“When you go to decide on how you’re going to do it it’s going to depend on what shape (the yard is) in. But then you’re going to want to start looking at your grass types, whether it be a fescue or a blue grass or a fescue blue mix,” Calhoun said. “And you’ll want something that’s disease tolerant as well as drought tolerant around here.”
Another potential issue to note is that, if you remember, in late summer 2022, we had army worms make it to our area. Kansas City and Springfield, Missouri, are seeing army worms make their way up from the south. Storm systems and the jet stream are carrying them. They can be problematic and kill off patches of grass.
