Research Update from PSU

Fairy Ring Liked the Summer of 2021!

By Mike Fidanza

If you visited the Twitter this summer, and entered the commonly used hashtag of #FriskyFairyRingFriday, you would have discovered many awesome photos of fairy ring affecting turf. Well, it’s “awesome” to a turfgrass pathologist. Not so much for the turfgrass manager. The wet spring and early summer, followed-by a challenging hot and dry period, caused or perhaps “revealed” fairy ring symptoms to literally show-up overnight. Fairy ring expresses itself as Type-III (appearance of mushrooms or puffballs), Type-II (lush turf growing in dark green rings or arcs), or Type-I (dead necrotic turf in a circle or arc, often the result of hydrophobic soil conditions). These three types can occur singularly or all together. Even the best preventive fungicide programs were a challenge to keep fairy ring suppressed this year. For curative control, good success was observed when the affected sites are first aerified (i.e., poke a lot of holes), apply a soil surfactant and irrigate thoroughly, and then apply a fairy ringlabeled fungicide and irrigate again. It also helps to irrigate again every few days to ensure uniform soil moisture. This should halt the fairy ring and give your turf the best chance for recovery. And if it’s any consolation, fairy ring is mother nature’s way of saying you have healthy soils.

Type I fairy ring in mid-July 2021

(photo by @scott_viking)