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Seaweed
The benefits of seaweed
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Duncan Gray offers an insight into the use of seaweed, both as a raw product and in liquid or granular form
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LEAF COLLECTORS LEAF COLLECTOR S
eaweed is classed as a soil conditioner in the gardening world, but its benefits are so extensive that it really should be given top billing when discussing the care of soil and growing of plants, as it contains over sixty minerals and trace elements, along with bio stimulants.
It can be used in many forms, ranging from being dug into your soil straight off the beach, through being dried and granulated or powdered, to many different liquid formulations.
For all your golf, sportsturf and landscape irrigation needs.
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Many links golf courses used to take seaweed from the adjacent beaches and cover greens with it during severe winters, which both protected the grass from the cold and provided a range of nutrients as it weathered down. When the weather improved the seaweed was removed and composted with sand to provide a very high quality topdressing material. Now, play continues all year round on most courses, so this practice is not feasible but, if there is seaweed available, then it is most certainly well worth harvesting and composting to provide your own supply of high quality topdressing material. It is also a valuable addition to divoting material, as germination and establishment is dramatically enhanced. In fact, I always advise adding seaweed meal or granules to the divot mix, as it is of great benefit on any golf course. In my time as Links
Superintendant at Lahinch, the beach and adjacent shorelines were constant sources of clean, high quality seaweed as, being on the atlantic coast of Ireland, there was no land between there and America.
We almost lost a tractor in the tide collecting the seaweed at one stage, but the effort was always well worthwhile. The seaweed was used to build large heaps, as pictured, with a layer of seaweed around 30cms thick, then a layer of our own dune sand around 10cms thick, with these layers repeated until the heap was around two metres high. Each heap was then turned over four times in the following year, then taken into the first of the three composting bays to dry out. After a few weeks of drying, the compost was then put through a Royer shredder into the second bay, and left for a further few weeks before the final step of screening into the third bay, at which stage it was ready for using as topdressing and for divotting. Fantastic compost, prepared from beach to usable in just over a year. Seaweed contains a wide range of nutrients and trace elements which combine in such a unique manner that, when seaweed is added to heavy clay soils, it acts as a floculator, which means it breaks down the heavy soil into a friable crumb structure, thereby providing a vastly improved growing medium. This, of course, does not happen overnight, but is one of the greatest benefits of long term applications on these types of soils.
On the other side of the coin, seaweed is an excellent addition to sandy soils, adding to the humous content and nutrient levels, and increasing drought resistance. Because of my experience, I do believe, in fact, that adding seaweed to the rootzone mix in any USGA green construction does alleviate the many problems,
Seaweed ready for lifting at Lahinch in Co Clare, Eire
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