Turfgrass on a Spanish Tour

The first time I went to Spain, I was a university student. I remember taking a bus out to the general vicinity of El Saler, walking to the club entrance, asking if I could meet the greenkeeper, and then being lucky enough to have that answer be yes. I proceeded to get a tour of the course and collected a soil sample from that sandy site that I would use for some of my graduate school soil testing research.

I would go back to Spain almost ten years later to speak at the AEdG Annual Congress in 2012, held that year in Madrid. I remember I had a chance to introduce the brand new (at the time) MLSN guidelines.

With the “Micah Woods Spanish Tour” coming up next month, in Madrid, San Roque, and Mallorca, I’ve been reflecting on all the things I’ve been studying since that first visit many years ago.

Since the 2012 Congress, I’ve come to understand a lot more about MLSN and how it works, I’ve figured out ways to rapidly check growth rate both above and belowground, and I’ve been working on linking those growth measurements to performance of fine turfgrass surfaces.

In these seminars on 8, 9, and 10 November, I’ll be talking about topics that I put under the heading of “Management strategies for more sustainable turfgrass surfaces.” That’s translated to “Estrategias de manejo para obtener céspedes más sostenibles.”

I’ll explain how I would use a range of techniques to produce the best possible turfgrass at any location and for any use, while doing so as efficiently as possible. The secret, as every turf manager knows, is necessarily unique to each location. One has to manage in a site-specific way. The textbooks can only take us so far. After we have those fundamentals, what are some techniques and tools that can be used to manage the grass effectively, using the performance of the grass as feedback? That’s the challenge for me to explain in November.