By Daryl Davidson
With sport become more popular and the weather becoming more extreme, there has been an increased need to repair sporting facilities during and after the playing season.
With prices increasing for everything these days, from fuel to fertilisers, the turf grown on the farm will cost the farmer a lot more money and this will be passed on to the customer.
There are some things you can trial next time you are looking to re-turf an area, especially if you have to repair the same area each year.
As clubs and players are usually lazy, they will set up in the same spot each time, and 9 times out of 10 the damage is caused by them. To save money, you can try talking to the players to move around, hire a grounds marshal to manage where people use the facilities or use technology and data with an Intelligent Play Camera that can tell you how many hours the areas have been used for each day. This data can be used to educate the clubs and players to help improve their facilities. See: intelligent-play.com
Increasing your fertiliser program can help your turf handle more wear and tear during and after the season. You can trial adding more fertiliser to the high-traffic areas to see if it helps reduce the areas needed to be repaired.
Aerating more regularly to relieve compaction the same with the fertiliser you can trial just aerating the high traffic areas more regularly.
Adding drainage or re-shaping the area that needs to be repaired yearly. Saturated soils and sport does not mix well at all, sometimes it can be an easy fix with the area maybe being created in to a man-made bowl after years of wet weather use. Fixing the levels can make sure the water runs to where it is supposed to go and not sit in a low-lying area.
Choosing when to re-turf can save you thousands of dollars. If you only have a short turn around your only option may be to repair straight away but if you wait a few months each year the grass might recover a bit more each year making your problem areas stronger as the plant has a chance to establish properly. Repairing a field straight after a season that only gets used for six months a year is only going to waste money as the plant only has six months to establish before it’s under pressure again. Letting as much grass grow back as possible with the help of aeration, fertiliser and water before repairing can shrink the area that needs to be repaired each year.
Choosing the right turf variety for the site is very important because if you are using the same variety each year and it continues to fail or the usage is increasing and the grass is struggling to survive after trying everything above, it may be time to trial some of the new varieties of turf that have been breed for this exact reason. Trialing a small area in your high traffic areas is the best place to trail a new variety because if it survives there it will have a better chance surviving everywhere else, trialling it in an area that has no traffic and full sun won’t give you the information you need to make a big and expensive decision to change turf varieties.
If you ever need any advice feel free to reach out to International Greenkeepers. We are more than happy to help out with advice and if we cannot help we can definitely recommend a qualified person in your area to give you the right advice.
Just send an email to internationalgreenkeepersfh@gmail.com
And check out our website internationalgreenkeepers.com for many more great tips.
