Brown Spots in Floritam

lawtyger – posted 21 July 2004 08:09

Just finished reading threads that I found as a result of a search on the forum. Very informative but I wanted to still describe my lawn situation to make sure my problem was similar to those I read about. Here are the facts:

Brand new house, and thus brand new Floritam lawn. Looked great until about one month ago when we saw a couple brown patches in the front yard. Then, the lawn especially on the sides of the house within 2 feet of the wall started looking like it was dying (not patches, just thin and light brownish).

Overall, the lawn looks like it is somewhat thinning out some (before you looked at it and it was completely green. . . now you look down at it and see some light brown mixed throughout). The thinning definitely is different than the two brown patches we have in the front yard.

From my reading, it sounds like fertilzer can sometime encourage fungus. It seems that these brown spots, etc. started popping up after I fertilized last. I’ve seen numerous suggestions to use corn meal to resolve this issue. Has anybody had results with this? This is our first lawn, and I don’t mean this in a negative way, but the idea of corn meal sounds funny We have a lot to learn I guess.

Actually, we are more concerned with the fact that the lawn on the sides of the home seem to be thinning and dying as it is a much larger area that seems to be getting infected (the brown patches are only about a foot across at this point and since they are still building homes across the street and laying new sod, we plan no replacing those patches upon the next new sod delivery).

Did I screw up possibly fertilizing (did it 3 times, 6 weeks apart, using Lesco from Home Depot)?

Dchall_San_Antonio – posted 03 September 2004 13:04

I have great results using corn meal against fungus disease. The reason it works is this. Corn meal attracts/feeds another fungus, a beneficial fungus called Trichoderma (try-ko-DER-ma). The Trichoderma likes to eat the cell structure of other fungi. Without a cell structure, the other fungi, the disease fungi, die. This is exactly like attracting birds to your garden to eat grasshoppers.

If you don’t kill the fungus, you’ll notice that the new sod will never establish and will die off in 2 weeks.

The fall back solution to corn meal is milk. ted (unregistered), my chief critic on this list, will love this one!! If you dilute 3 ounces of milk into a gallon of water and spray the grass, that should kill fungus, too. I’m not sure why milk works but the experience of people who try it is that it works. Any kind of milk is fine. The third fall back against fungus is baking soda. This is the big guns. three ounces of baking soda per gallon sprayed will kill all fungus. This is not desireable but often preferable to no grass. You can get your fungi back with compost and more corn meal to fertilize.

Outdoors – posted 15 November 2004 07:59

Where do you get corn meal to put on your lawn? How do you apply? Is it in power form? Please describe.

Thanks.

turfie – posted 15 November 2004 09:25

Just a note on cornmeal:

It very well may stimulate the growth of beneficial fungi in the soil, but it may be woth considering that research labs also often use it in media to grow plant pathogenic fungi in culture.

If beneficial fungi would utilize cornmeal in the soil, then why wouldn’t other fungi?

Ross Page – posted 17 November 2004 12:20

you have not got a fungus problem. You need to look at your irrigation system and quantity of applications. Coverage of a badly designed irrigation system will leave borders to dry out and lack of quantity in the middle will cause the turf to sacrifice its older leaves; turning them brwon as they die off.