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In 1999 construction began on a new Robert Trent Jones II golf course on the north shore of the Spanish resort island of Mallorca, near the entry to the harbor at Alcudia.
Due to the poor quality of the irrigation water available, Alcanada Golf Club had to find turfgrasses that would not only tolerate a high salt content but thrive in brackish water. There has been a lot of interest in the golf industry in the development of various paspalum varieties on turf grass, given its ability to tolerate very salty water.
While paspalum may well have been our only realistic choice, we were very pleased to discover that it is an excellent turfgrass and will provide a high quality playing surface at Alcanada. As the use of paspalum is a fairly recent development and we now have some experience sprigging and growing it in, we wanted to share our experience.
Had the option been available, we would have chosen cool season grasses for Alcanada, given that the main golf season in Mallorca is during the winter. Instead we chose a grass that is typically planted anywhere bermudagrass would normally be used. Paspalum, we found, tolerates cold weather better than bermudagrass can. While paspalum does eventually go dormant, it will hold color much longer and will remain green as long as the coolest temperatures stay above 2C to 3C. Paspalum can even tolerate an occasional light frost as long as it doesn't last for more than two or three days. We have experienced a purple color in the stems during cold weather, a condition that can be treated with iron applications in the fall.
In good water conditions bermudagrass infestation can be problem with paspalum, a problem we experienced during rainy periods. There would be little reason to use paspalum, and certainly not the fairway varieties, in weather and water conditions where bermudagrass thrives. In salty water conditions, however, paspalum is crucial, and means the difference between having a golf course and not.
At Alcanada, our irrigation water presently varies anywhere from 8,000 to 10,000ppm total salts, certainly unacceptable for irrigation with normal grasses. We are using municipal wastewater to irrigate our golf course, as required by law, but the town's sewer lines, many buried below sea level, allow high infiltration of salty water due to disrepair. These high levels of salt do benefit the turfgrass by providing a weed control system, and once our turf is firmly established the salinity should insure even turf quality. The paspalum easily tolerates the levels of salt we apply. (There are stands of maintained paspalum that use straight sea water as weed control and on occasion even direct applications of rock salt in problem areas.)
There are some management issues associated with highly saline irrigation water, primarily salt damage to trees. We have numerous carob trees suffering from salt burn. Our olive trees are doing better than the carob, but not as well as we would like. Pines seem to do well unless the spray goes directly into the crown of the tree where we do get some needle burn. Palms and palmettos don't seem effected. We are looking into bringing in a variety of salt-tolerate tamarind to replace the carob trees.
We are using two varieties of paspalum:
For fairways and mowed roughs we are using Salam, supplied by Southern Turf. We created local nurseries on leased land where we irrigated the sprigs with fresh water to establish our stands. We harvested sprigs from the nursery and planted at the typical rate we would use with bermudagrass. Paspalam Salam is a good hardy turfgrass and we feel our fairways will maintain excellent turf mowing them at 10 to 12 mm. In the event of a very cold winter and severe loss of color, there will be little we can do, since the poor water quality would kill any overseed. This past winter was one of the coldest, and wettest, on record in Mallorca. While we did not have the lush color we wanted, our paspalum remained green while the local courses with bermuda grass all went dormant and yellowed out.
We are using Sea Dwarf from Emerald Isle Turf on our greens and tees. We were late in finding and buying the sprigs, so were unable to get a nursery started. Instead we bought and had shipped in from Florida enough grass to plant out all the putting surfaces at once. That was a big expense, but the stolon quality was excellent and, even though we planted very late in the season, we had nearly 100% coverage before dormancy. We are now harvesting sprigs from the greens to plant out tee tops. The Sea Dwarf appears to be an exceptional grass. It retains a deep green color much better and longer than Salam and has a very fine texture. It grows very dense and vigorously and we do not expect much if any encroachment of Salam into greens or tee tops. We anticipate that Alcanada will have not only unique but wonderful tee and putting surfaces. Sea Dwarf would be a very high maintenance fairway grass, but it appears in our brief experience to be perfect on greens and tees.
There are certainly more varieties of paspalum coming on the market and they will be improving all the time. With water now such a finite resource, we must find ways to utilize water of poorer and poorer quality. Paspalum holds the greatest promise of any turfgrass under these conditions.
If water quality is an issue and temperatures are appropriate for warm season grasses, varieties of paspalum are evolving quickly into the cultivars of choice.
Fred Downes is the Coordinator of Design Implementation Services for RTJII.
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