NE Ohio Lawn Care Seminar Aims to Grow Grass Even Greener

WOOSTER, Ohio — Green lawns, clean water and healthy honey bees can go hand in hand. The Northeast Ohio Lawn Care Seminar aims to show how.

Now in its 13th year, the annual event offers training to the region’s lawn care and landscape professionals. It features new ways to keep things green — in more ways than one — by experts from industry and The Ohio State University. Its sponsor is the Ohio Lawn Care Association.

Sessions will focus on environmentally sound maintenance practices, said the event’s program planner, Joe Rimelspach, turfgrass pathology specialist with Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences and a technical adviser to the association.

“People in the industry really want to do things the best way possible — the most environmentally sound way,” he said. “This is one of the ways OLCA helps them do it.”

The event is 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 18 in the Shisler Conference Center at the college’s research arm, the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, 1680 Madison Ave. in Wooster.

Included in the program will be talks on how to protect honey bees, how to help those bees by growing certain plants in the landscape, and how to keep pesticide and fertilizer granules from washing into storm sewers and polluting lakes and streams.

Speakers at a series of stations will cover such topics as weed management in turf and in ornamental landscape beds, insect identification and management on trees and shrubs, accurate application techniques, and new equipment and products.

“We break the audience down into small groups, and they rotate through the stations,” Rimelspach said. “Each station lasts about a half hour, they get the latest information about the topic, and then there’s an interactive assessment, a quiz, a little competition between the groups.

“It’s very hands-on, small-group-driven.”

Giving one of the event’s main talks will be the college’s expert on honeybees. Reed Johnson, assistant professor of entomology, will present “An Overview of the Problems Facing Bees: OSU Research and What Can Be Done to Improve the Situation.”

“Many of the insecticides used in the lawn care industry will kill bees if used inappropriately,” he said. “On the other side of the coin, lawns and gardens represent a huge potential food source for bees if blooming flowers are planted.

“I’ll be talking about basic honeybee biology and how choices made in the care of lawns could help or harm honeybees and other pollinators.”

Other speakers at the event will come from BASF, Scotts LawnService, and several other programs in the college.

Find full program details and a link to online registration at go.osu.edu/OLCA2015NEOhio.

Preregistration for OLCA members is $40 for the first person from a company and $30 for each additional person from the same company. Nonmember preregistration is $75. Preregistration includes refreshments, lunch and instructional materials. The deadline to preregister is June 12.

Participants also can take the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s pesticide applicators licensing test during the seminar. Details about it, too, are on the event’s website.

For more information, contact OLCA’s Lori Landry at 614-501-1100, ext. 3351, or llandry@offinger.com.

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