Hendersonville Country Club - Hendersonville, NC

With gentle rolling hills and wide valleys, the Donald Ross designed Hendersonville Country Club is a picture of stress-free terrain. Unless you’re its superintendent.

The private, 18-hole, par-70 course in Hendersonville, N.C., hosts more than 32,000 rounds of golf each year. Kirk McKinney joined the course in January 2007 as golf course superintendent, taking on the challenge of keeping the 1933 push-up greens healthy despite wear, tear and compaction from more than 70 years of heavy traffic.

“Keeping water off the greens is crucial to prevent conditions for disease,” McKinney said. “It’s also tough maintaining the course’s Poa annua as temperatures increase in the summer.”

Anthracnose had been a consistent summertime problem for several years.

“The turf was fine when I began working here,” McKinney explained. “But at the end of May, I saw signs of anthracnose on the greens and we quickly lost five to 10 percent of turf on five or six greens.”

The disease showed up as reddish-brown lesions ranging from the size of a pencil eraser to five to six feet in diameter in the most advanced areas.

Based on the course’s limited success at controlling the disease in the past, McKinney knew he needed to modify the existing fungicide program.

“The other products weren’t giving us control and they were losing their punch,” he said.

McKinney’s distributor recommended Trinity™ fungicide as safe to use during the summer stress period. Shortly before he planned to make his first Trinity application, McKinney attended a distributor meeting for superintendents where BASF sales representative Willie Pennington gave a presentation on the product. Because of the high temperatures in the area, Pennington recommended applying the fungicide at the lower one-ounce rate, increasing the intervals to avoid turf damage.

McKinney prepared a tank mix of Trinity at a rate of one ounce per 1,000 square feet and Insignia® fungicide at a rate of .9ounce per 1,000 square feet to treat the anthracnose and controldollar spot. He applied the fungicides – along with fertilizer and growth regulator — in four spray applications, 30 days apart, on the course’s greens, collars, and areas surrounding greens and approaches. Between applications, he used other products with different modes of action. As a cultural control, McKinney’s crew rolled greens weekly and moderated mowing heights.

• Read more about Trinity® herbicide Success Snapshot ( pdf, 321 KB)