By DoMyOwn staff
Learn some quick tips to prevent dollar spot fungus in your lawn.
Hey everybody it's Heath from DoMyOwn.com.
Today we're going to talk to you about dollar spot fungus.
Once dollar spot has started to form in the lawn, you'll notice little stages of mycelium forming at the leaf's surface.
These look like spider webs at the top of leaf's surface if you catch it in the early morning when dew is on the lawn.
From there, you'll notice the grass is being damaged and see little brown areas the size of a dollar piece coin. If gone unchecked, these tiny circles will from together to create bigger damaged areas.
Water is the major contributor to dollar spot fungus forming.
It's due to high humidity and long periods of dew sitting on the lawn that causes the fungus to actually form.
So when watering, it's very important that you water early in the morning, just as sun is starting to rise so the water doesn't sit on the surface for a very long time.
Do not water at night or the evening because that water will sit on the lawn for a long period of time causing the fungus to spread.
So if you take pride in your lawn, you might want to apply a fungicide to prevent dollar spot fungus from ever popping up.
To determine when it's right to put a fungicide down for dollar spot fungus, you should check with the air temperature and humidity.
Anytime the two are added together and are greater than 160, you're right for the development of dollar spot fungus. This is gonna be ideal for both warm and cool season turfs.
Some of the key factors for preventing dollar spot fungus is mowing on a regular basis.
Make sure that mower blade is very sharp so you're not cutting the edges of the leaf surface to allow that fungus to enter.
So when mowing the lawn if you have dollar spot fungus in one general area, cut that area and make sure that you clean the mower blade or save that for the last area to be cut.
You need to make sure that you clean the mower blade prior to so you don't spread it throughout the entire lawn.
Another good way to prevent dollar spot fungus is to increase the airflow.
If you can trim back bushes or low lying tree branches, you can allow more airflow to come through so you don't have dew sitting on the lawn for extended periods of time.
Another way to eliminate dollar spot is to eliminate the thatch on the lawn or the soil compaction.
You can eliminate the thatch by doing a power rake or just a rake in general.
You can eliminate the soil compaction by doing an aeration - pulling out the cores and allowing more oxygen and nutrients to get to the soil.
Make sure you're sticking to a good lawn care schedule as well as a good maintenance schedule to prevent dollar spot fungus from forming.
Thank you for watching!
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