It’ll stunt your GROWTH!
Climate change is starting to wreak havoc with Britain's sport and leisure facilities, as sportsgrounds and venues increasingly begin to bake in summer then flood in winter. Such extremes of weather are requiring councils to revise their maintenance policies to keep within budget and also to optimise use - a tough challenge.
more councils are considering retardants as one way to limit growth and keep a lid on the volume of green waste they generate.
The concept of using growth retardants to manage the rate of grass growth in the grounds maintenance and turf care industries, while not new, has taken a new turn in Yorkshire, where Mark Dempsey, Parks and Street Scene Central Support Manager for Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council, has turned their application on its head. Mark’s role is to foster a greener, cleaner, safer environment for parks, municipal green spaces, streets and highways and to focus on environmental issues and sustainability. “It’s a broad area to cover,” says Dempsey, who has some thirty years experience in practical amenity horticulture, “but the council is very environmentally proactive and committed to improving the community’s health and facilities.” After attending last year’s BTME show
FOR outdoor sports facilities, the milder weather offers the attraction of a longer playing season, and with it the prospect of raised income. However, milder weather also encourages a longer growing season for turf, which is why
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in Harrogate, Dempsey decided to set up a trial of a growth retardant along the Sustrans Hebble Trail near Halifax in a bid to suppress the growth of native grass species and establish wildflower colonisation.
Begun last summer, the trial has been a success even allowing for extremes of hot and wet weather. The three profile areas were non-maintained natural grass containing wildflower species, an area treated the previous winter with a total
translocated glyphosphate herbicide then planted with native wildflower plug plants, and an area of natural grass, again planted with native wildflower plug plants. “The results were positive and, in all
three areas using Syngenta's turf growth regulator Primo MAXX, supplied by Scotts, wildflowers became dominant over the native grass and also allowed the young wildflower plugs to establish themselves. No mowing was needed until autumn.”
Mark’s vision for growth retardant use has spread to highways and now to bowling greens. “The Hebble trial’s aim was to try and establish use of growth retardants as part of Calderdale parks and street highway maintenance regimes to reduce operator exposure to potential road traffic accidents.” “We have been trialling the product on a central reservation where a one metre wide strip next to the road is treated, enabling operators to work nearer traffic less frequently because there are fewer cuttings needed. Fuel savings alone can pay for the cost of the chemical and we are reducing the volume of green waste generated.” Now Calderdale’s twenty bowling
greens are set to receive regular treatment too if trials, which began in April on one of them, prove successful. The tradition of lawn bowls, particularly Crown Green, is especially strong in northern England, although
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