Luckily for those of you who put a lot of time and energy into maintaining your lawn ‘Take All Patch Disease’ isn’t a common problem, if it was there would be headaches a plenty among the lawn enthusiast community. Extremely difficult to control without fungicides, this disease is far easier to prevent than cure.
Appearance
Take all Patch tends to show up during the height of summer, and is characterised by dry straw coloured patches of grass between 50 and 100 centimetres in diameter. As the disease worsens more patches are likely develop and grow, eventually joining up leaving large areas of your lawn looking scorched and tired as the roots completely die. You might well find that the turf comes away from the ground when peeled away due to the weakend and dead roots.
Prevention
To prevent this ailment from striking:
- Scarify the lawn to remove thatch and organic matter that the disease may be living on
- Aerate the lawn to remove surface water and allow bacteria to thrive in the soil that will prevent the disease
- Keep the lawn well fed with the usual nitrogen based fertiliser, and in particular for this disease, applying magnesium can help prevent an outbreak
- Use resistant grass types such as Fescue and Ryegrass as these are unaffected by Take All Patch Disease. To encourage their growth, apply their seeds liberally to your existing lawn
- Try to avoid any practice that will raise the pH of the lawn such as the application of lime, as this creates perfect conditions for the disease. If raising the pH is unavoidable try to neutralise the lawn afterwards with another product such as iron sulphite.
