Source: Palm Beach (Fla.) Post
If you think watching grass grow is a stress-free activity, eavesdropping on turf professionals will change your mind.
"My grub problem is driving me crazy," one confides to another.
One of the many purposes of the 18th annual South Florida Turf Day, sponsored by the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, was to provide a little professional group therapy.
The IFAS compound, located near the campus of Nova Southeastern University, offered a setting where several hundred golf course and park managers and others in the grass business could exchange ideas and help each other solve problems.
Besides grubs, there are swarms of other creepy critters that go after grass in Florida, including nematodes, or microscopic worms that attack grass roots - and Southern chinch bugs.
These pests are the lawn lover's worst nightmare, causing great patches of discolored and eventually dead grass instead of the ideal green carpet.
At Turf Day, held Thursday, University of Florida scientists in straw farmer hats stood out in the baking sun and showed off the latest experimental grass varieties and the newest ways to remove those pests that are the ruination of a good lawn.
Turf people flock to the annual grass exposition for good reason. UF plant breeders developed Floratam, one of the most commonly used lawn grasses, in the 1970s and are continually working to top that success.
Floratam grows like a weed, though, so a slow-growing variety would save labor and equipment costs by making mowing less frequent.
At demonstration site number 2, Russell Nagata and Ron Cherry, scientists from the UF center in Belle Glade, had good news in the form of NU76, a new grass with two sterling qualities: It grows slower and chinch bugs don't like it . . . yet.
There is no completely resistant grass, Cherry said, telling the grass people something they are already too painfully aware of. As soon as NU76 goes on the market, a year or so from now, the chinch bugs will get right to work, overcoming its carefully cultivated resistance to them.
Grass, to chinch bugs, is "just one big buffet," Cherry said.
Think of Turf Day as you would an auto show. The grasses on display are like prototype cars. They may not end up at your house for years, but it's still good to know they're coming.
"Most of these are works in progress," said Dan Schweiger, a spray technician from Boca West Country Club, which sent five staff members who oversee 500 acres of golf course grass and landscaping.
Unless you're the person mowing, feeding or watering it, grass is an almost subliminal part of modern life, but its care and feeding is an $8 billion industry.
And in Florida, with about 1,400 green-carpeted courses, golf is a major tourist draw and its economic ripple effect is significant.
Besides golf courses, there is grass on the soccer, baseball and cricket fields where you and your children play, the parks where you jog, the city greenways and, of course, your lawn.
Grass is even a significant factor in landfills and the dike surrounding Lake Okeechobee. Not only does it prevent erosion, but it's easy for maintenance crews to spot leaks through close-cropped blades of grass.
Green, as in money, is always on grass managers' minds. An 18-hole golf course costs about $1 million a year to maintain.
So is safety. UF scientists are working on pesticides that won't make landscape workers sick. A new nematocide, for instance, is being developed as a by-product of sugar cane processing.
Robin Giblin-Davis, just back from a research trip in Central America, is developing a nematode that would make invasive melaleuca trees unable to form buds. Other new nematodes could eat the sting nematode before it ruins the grass.
The equipment available to landscapers and lawn maintenance professionals is so much more than just the latest aerator in a classic shade of green or orange. On display were lysimeters and geographic positioning systems, light-intensity measuring computer terminals to mount on tractors - altogether more space-age than sod-farm.
This is the grass management of the future. At the UF center in Davie, a lawn professional can supplement his or her practical experience by earning degrees in horticulture and landscape science and urban pest management.
That educational boost can position a person for a job as a golf course manager, whose average salary is $60,000.