brown spots

5madden – posted 30 December 2003 07:16

I am having problems with brown spots in my St. Augustine. The primary spot is where we cleaned our pool filter. Does anyone think that might have been a factor. Also, should I put down a fungicide now? I just put down some horse manure comppost hoping I could avoid chemical fertilizers. Should I seed that area to help it along? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Dchall_San_Antonio – posted 05 January 2004 13:40

There is no St Augustine seed, so that’s out. You could throw a piece of sod in but if you have fungus in the area, the new sod will die right away. What I would do is sprinkle in a few handfulls of compost with some corn meal, let it sit for 3 weeks, and then lay the sod down. That should take care of the fungus. Oh, and put more corn meal on the new sod. New sod seems to be especially prone to getting fungus if you don’t do that.

The chlorine in the pool water may have sterilized the soil leaving it open for disease microbes to take over. The compost will rebalance the microbe populations while the corn meal feeds them.